Steak and Eggs with Heirloom Tomatoes and Greens

This one is actually my husband's doing, but I wanted to post it because it is so yummy and pretty, not to mention simple.










One steak

2 eggs

One heirloom tomato

Mixed greens

Oil and Vinegar

Salt and pepper

Cook steak according to liking. Slice into thin slices.

Slice tomato into thin slices.

Poach eggs. We like to do ours in a ramekin in the microwave for 25 or 30 seconds.

Toss greens with oil and vinegar.

Salt and pepper everything as desired, and voila!

Celery Boats with Egg Salad, Bacon and Avocado

This was a delicious lunch. I love egg salad, but the idea of eating it off a spoon does not appeal to me -- way too mushy -- so the celery and bacon provided just the right crunch.

4 stalks of celery
2 hard boiled eggs
mayo to taste (homemade or a brand without sugar)
3 to 4 slices of bacon
avocado
salt and pepper


Make the egg salad by mushing up the eggs with a fork until crumbly. Stir in a little bit of mayo (you don't need much, just enough to bring the eggs together into a solid mass). Salt and pepper to taste.

Take four washed celery stalks and fill with the egg salad. Top with crumbled bacon and avocado slices. Serves two for a light lunch.

Stuffed Peppers With Ground Beef and Eggs

This was delicious, really easy, and I had plenty of leftover stuffing to put in an egg scramble the next morning for breakfast! This easily filled two peppers and could have filled four.

2 bell peppers
Butter or olive oil
1 pound ground beef
1 onion
Italian parsley
Eggs
Salt and Pepper

Fill a pot with water and bring to a boil. Cut the tops off of the bell peppers and deseed them. Parboil for about 5 minutes or so to soften them.

Meanwhile, dice and saute the onion in the butter or oil until soft, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add the beef, salt, and pepper, and throw in a few handfuls of parsley leaves. Saute until the meat is cooked.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Put a little bit of water in a baking dish so the peppers don't stick to it. Put the peppers in the dish and fill with the meat and onion mixture, leaving a little bit of room at the top for the egg. Bake for 30 minutes or so.

Take the peppers out of the oven and crack an egg on the top of them so that the egg covers the meat filling. Turn the oven to Broil and broil for five minutes or so, or until the egg is cooked to your liking.

Garnish with salt, pepper and a few parsley leaves if you're feeling fancy.

Savory Crepes with Bacon, Spinach, Mushrooms and Cream Sauce

I am completely addicted, ADDICTED, to crepes. My 7 year-old loves them in the morning with some bacon and shredded cheddar thrown inside of them, so I like to make a big batch on the weekend and microwave them throughout the week.

I was inspired by a crepes recipe in Mark Sisson's cookbook, but I modified it a little. He uses coconut milk and coconut flour, I use regular milk and almond flour in a slightly higher amount (not because I have anything against coconut flour, it's just that the local store doesn't carry it, although a coconut did once kill my best friend so maybe that is why I have not sought it out...kidding).

Crepes:

1/2 cup milk
2 Tbsp butter
5 Tbsp almond flour (sometimes I add even more if it seems too thin)
8 egg whites

Dump the almond flour in a big bowl. Melt the butter and pour it in. Stir these two ingredients together into a paste (do this before you add the milk or coconut milk and it will help it mix more smoothly). Pour in the milk and mix well. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites with a whisk until they are really frothy (it helps if you use a really big bowl so you can really get some momentum going on those suckers). Pour the egg whites into the mix in a few batches, stirring them in each time.

Heat a pan on the stove. I personally use my All Clad griddle because it is smooth as a baby's bottom and NOTHING ever sticks to it. When I tried to make these in a regular pan, I basically got scrambled egg whites. The kicker, though, is that these crepes are VERY runny, so they kind of want to run all over the place. So if you are going to make them on a griddle, you have to be a little creative in keeping the crepes from running down the sides. And you have to make your peace that the crepes will not be round.

Anyways, heat these bad boys up, pouring about 1/4 of a cup at a time. They cook pretty fast, so flip as soon as you see bubbles. In my experience, the second side cooks even faster the first.

Filling and Sauce:

1 bag of spinach
1 chopped portabella mushroom
1 diced onion
bacon (get nitrate free kind with no sugar added if you can find it)
1 cup milk
2 Tbsp almond flour
butter
parmesan cheese

To make the cream sauce, melt 2 Tbsp of buter in a sauce pan. and mix in 2 Tbsp almond flour. This is called making a roux. When you make a roux, you are making a thickening agent for a sauce or soup. Keep the butter and flour in equal ratios, but you can increase or decrease the amount of each one to alter the thickness of the resulting sauce. Amazing, I know.

Once the butter and almond flour combine to make a paste, add the milk. Throw in a few handfuls of shredded parmesan, and let it simmer until it thickens. Turn off the heat and let it cool while you make the fillings.

Make the bacon in a pan (I highly doubt I need to explain how to do this). Melt some butter or olive oil (or use the bacon grease from the bacon you just made, you little multi-tasker, you) in a pan and saute the onion until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms and saute until soft, about 5 minutes again. Throw in 1/2 the bag of spinach (or if you are feeling a little crazy or just watched Popeye, dump in the whole bag, why don't ya?) and cook until the spinach wilts, which will only take a minute or two. Turn off the heat.

Place one or two crepes on a plate and top with vegetable mix. Crumble one or two pieces of bacon on top, and drizzle with your cream sauce. Salt and pepper if desired.

My crepes are never quite big enough to actually roll the up around the ingredients, so I tend to serve this open-faced.

Chipotle Salmon Tacos

1 large fillet of wild caught salmon
1/4 cup mayonnaise or so
1 can of chipotle peppers (use only a few peppers, you can add more or less to your spicy threshold)
salt
1 jicama, chopped or diced
1 head of cabbage or other sturdy green leaf

Grill the salmon until it is cooked to your liking. Chop up the chiptole peppers (primal disclaimer:the brand that I use has a little bit of vegetable oil and wheat flour in the adobo sauce that they are in, but I would love to find a brand that does not have this). Add them to the mayonnaise (either make it yourself or buy the brand Spectrum, otherwise the mayo will probably have sugar in it). Place a piece of salmon on a cabbage leaf and spread the sauce on top of it. Top with jicama and season with salt if desired.

Another fun way that we like to do this dish is to chop the salmon up and mix it in with the mayo and chipotle, as if you are making tuna salad or something like that. Then we use a "spiralizer" to turn the whole jicama into jicama noodles. We then put the noodles on a plate and top with a large dollop of the salmon mixture.

Turnip Gnocchi Crumble

Hmmm, this did not go as planned at all. So I got it in my head that I wanted to make gnocchi, a pasta traditionally made with flour and potatoes. I decided to give it a go with almond flour and turnips. I used:

2 cups almond flour
1 lb of boiled turnips, sent through a potato ricer
1 egg

I combined it all in a bowl and stirred it up. After about 5 minutes, I realized this was not looking anything like pasta dough, so I added yet another cup of almond flour, pausing to note the sheer amount of calories that must now be present in this bowl of goo that I had created.

After quite a bit of stirring and hoping, I realized that short of a miracle, this bowl was not turning into gnocchi anytime this century. We had some leftover buffalo ragu from the night before, so hubby and I decided to go to Plan B and have leftovers. Meanwhile, I did not want to waste my bowl of goo that I had lovingly slaved over (and almond flour is not cheap, so I didn't want to pour $8 worth of it down the drain, I can be stingy that way), so I decided to stick it in the oven and see just exactly what might happen. I spread it around in a baking dish and put it in the oven at 375 while we ate our more edible dinner.

I am not sure how long it was in there, maybe 10 or 15 minutes? Anyways, it essentially turned into a cake with a very almondy and slightly turnip flavor, but pretty neutral overall. I ran a fork through it to turn it into a crumble, and served it with some homemade whipped cream (just a container of heavy whipping cream that I used the magic of the kitchen mixer to whip up) sprinkled with cinammon and topped with peaches. It wasn't half bad.

Were I to make this again (which I doubt I would because I am not a huge dessert person and only made this as a dessert by accident), I bet I could use less almond flour, but I am not sure how that would affect the texture or ability to bake into a cake-like texture. Maybe one day I'll give it a go!

Fig and Prosciutto Pizza

This recipe combines a pizza crust recipe I found on Mark's Daily Apple with a recipe I modified slightly from the cookbook Figs. I eat it with a fork and knife. I imagine you could cook the crust longer and get it crisp enough to eat with your hands, but I am a fork-and-knife-pizza kind of girl, so I have never bothered to find out.

Pizza Crust:

1 pound of eggplant, grated
1 egg white
1/2 cup almond flour
1/2 cup shredded parmesan

Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Place a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet and lightly oil it with olive oil. Spread the mixture onto the parchment paper, forming it into a pizza-sized circle. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Take it out, use edges of the parchment paper to help you flip the crust over onto the baking sheet. Bake again for another 5 to 10 minutes.

Toppings:

homemade fig preserves (see below)
garlic
gorgonzola
olive oil
green onion
prosciutto (about 3 ounces should do it)

Spread a light layer of olive oil all over the crust. Ditto for the minced garlic. Spread dollops of fig preserves and gorgonzola evenly on the dough. Tear up (by hand, or feel free to involve some kitchen shears here) the prosciutto and spread around evenly. Salt and pepper that puppy. Stick it back in the oven for about 5 to 7 minutes. Pull out and cool slightly. Chiffonade the green onion (this is just a fancy way of saying cut it into strips, but it will really impress any foodie friends if you use it around them). Garnish the top of the pizza with the green onions, and voila!

Fig Preserves:

This is kind of a big pain in the butt to make, so if you are doing this for a dinner party or something, I would suggest you make it the day before using it. It will keep in your fridge for probably a week. This recipe makes enough preserves to do about 2 or 3 pizzas, depending on how much you use.

1 tsp olive oil
3 diced shallots
1 cup red wine
1/4 cup chicken borth
1/4 cup veal or beef broth
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tsp chopped rosemary leaves
1 teaspoon of honey
1 rounded cup dried mission figs, quartered

First of all, I like to add in more rosemary than 1 teaspoon. Generally, I smell the rosemary, and if it is pretty potent I will add just a little over a teaspoon, but if I don't happen to have the world's most potent rosemary that day, I just add and add it to my little heart's content. Otherwise, it just kind of gets lost in the dish.

Place a medium sized skillet over medium heat. Add the oil and the shallots (if you don't have shallots or don't feel like pretending you are a giant cutting a miniature onion, you could just use onion and no one would know the difference). Cook about 3 minutes until the shallots are softened. Deglaze with the red wine and reduce by half. Add the broths and vinegar and reduce by half. Add the rosemary and honey (you can either leave the honey out or alter it to get the sweetness that you like)

Lower the heat and add the figs. Cook about 10 minutes, stirring often, until the figs are rehydrated. Cook until the mixture has the consistency of a liquidy jam.