Kids Make Deviled Eggs

We couldn't very well have a food appreciation class without something to snack on. So while our Salvadoran curtido is curing, the kids made these deviled eggs.

Actually, I hardboiled the eggs ahead of time in the manner described in our earlier post. Then the kids peeled the eggs and we whipped 1 dozen yolks with 1/4 cup mayonnaise, 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

To finish the eggs, we spooned our finshed yolk mix into a plastic storage bag, cut off the tip of one corner and squeezed the mix into the whites. The plastic bag makes a very efficient pastry sack. Simply dust with a little paprika.

Can I just say, kids love deviled eggs.

Hardboiled Eggs

It's true that older eggs are easier to peel when they've been hardboiled. It's also true that you don't have to wait for your eggs to get old to remove the peels without destroying the eggs.

I use Julia Child's method of alternately heating and chilling the eggs. Here's how it works.

For a dozen eggs, choose the best you can find, preferably pasture-raised eggs. Place them at the bottom of a large, heavy pot and cover with 3 1/2 quarts cold water. Bring the pot to a boil. As soon as it begins to boil, remove the pot and allow the eggs to sit, covered, for exactly 17 minutes.

When the 17 minutes have elapsed, carefully remove the eggs to a large bowl of iced water (you may want to buy a bag of ice for this). Allow the eggs to sit in the iced water for 2 minutes. Meanwhile, put the pot on the stove and bring the water back to a boil. (Remove the eggs from the iced water after the 2 minutes are up.) In batches of 6, return the eggs to the boiling water for 10 seconds only. Then remove again and place back in the iced water. Crack each egg in several places (or not, if you are planning to decorate them for Easter) and let the eggs rest in the iced water until well chilled.

Your eggs are now ready for peeling.

Breakfast

Swiss cheese omelet with Canadian bacon and onion tops.

Preparation: 10 minutes

Shopping: none

A high quality Emmentaler cheese brings a great deal of flavor and a bit of saltiness to this omelet. I also dice some Canadian bacon stored in the fridge. This time of year we are growing onion in seed trays for transplanting in April. As the slender leaves get very long and begin to topple over, I cut them back and scatter the trimmings over my eggs. They taste like chives, but even stronger.

For a high-protein breakfast, add a couple of slices of your favorite bacon. We like ours from Benton's, but when that runs out the slab bacon from Whole Foods makes a worthy substitute. Or perhaps you've found a bacon you like at the local farmer's market? I roast the bacon on a parchment-covered baking sheet in a 350-degree oven. Save the grease for frying and sauteing.

Ridiculously Fresh Poached Eggs

I practically stole these eggs right out from under the mother hens. They were still warm. This was a week ago when I collected a dozen on Leigh Hauter's farm outside The Plains, Virginia. Note: They do need to be washed once you get them home.

The eggs cook fairly quickly in a simmering skillet of vinegar-scented water. No fancy equipment--just ease the eggs right from the shell into the water. When they've set, scoop them out with a slotted spoon. Fresh eggs hold together much better than older eggs. Save your old eggs for hard-boiling.

In my quest for protein, I've been cleaning out the freezer as well as dark corners of the fridge. The eggs are nesting on several slices of perfectly cured prosciutto from Benton's Smokey Mountain Country Ham, same place where we order our bacon. Up to now the prosciutto had escaped my attention, so this was my first taste of it and do you know what? Close your eyes and you would never know it came from Madinsonville, Tennessee. Tastes just like Parma, Italy (maybe a little earthier, saltier).

The prosciutto is my new favorite way of getting the runny yolks from plate to mouth.

Winter's Revenge

Leigh Hauter said he never saw it coming.

"I didn't realize it was getting that cold," he said of the afternoon the Big Freeze descended. "We went for a walk and the water in the boiler was already frozen."

The wood-fired boiler in question is the one that heats farmer Hauter's greenhouse and his thousands of new seedlings. They represent nothing less than his spring crops for the coming CSA season. If he couldn't somehow get his frozen boiler working again in the face of a near-record March cold snap, he was looking at thousands of dollars in damage.

Leigh rose early the next morning and got to work trying to feed fresh water to the boiler. That meant hauling many hundreds of feet of fresh plastic pipe up Bull Run Mountain to the artesian well that supplies his water. The old 1 1/4"-inch water pipe was not only frozen solid after a night of temperatures dipping into single digits, it had burst open in several places.

Soon Leigh's water-soaked gloves were frozen as well, then his hands as he struggled into the second day to replace the pipes. A blast of wind ripped off his hat and made his work seem all the more desperate. Meanwhile, thousands of trays of seedlings inside the greenhouse were beginning to feel the effects. The potting soil was freezing. The seedlings were wilting.

After two days of this, the return of winter--in the form of a nasty cold front that had dumped snow from Birmingham in the deep south all the way to Boston--finally moved out to sea and Leigh surveyed the damage. He called a nursery in Indiana and placed an order for replacement seedlings that set him back at least $2,000.

But look here. As the greenhouse thawed again, there were signs of life where none could rightly be expected. Tiny seedlings, barely an inch tall, had managed to survive even when the soil they were rooted it had frozen stiff. "It's amazing, isn't it?" said Leigh as he reached down to inspect his little broccoli plants. "The sorrel wasn't affected at all," he says, pointing to plastic trays where hundreds of sprouts are growing.

So it is back to getting ready for a new year at Bull Run Farm outside The Plains, Virginia. Leigh continues to plant and water his seed trays. Meanwhile, his CSA subscribers are ready for a new season as well. Sunday was an open house wherein subscribers were invited out to the farm for tours and to collect their own eggs. Leigh has two busy chicken tractors in the fields. At one, the chicks that arrived last October just a day old are now full-grown and have started laying eggs.

Around the other tractor, the chickens mingle with geese strutting and honking around the enclosure, as well as several heritage turkeys that have formed a gobbling chorus. Leigh uses the geese to perform weeding chores on the farm. But apparently they also like to eat chicken eggs, so Leigh has the nesting area covered with a tarp. He pulls back the tarp and we collect a dozen eggs, all laid within the last couple of hours and still warm.

Leigh had expected a few visitors but instead several dozen subscribers showed up. He'd been giving tours all morning. I wondered if our current economic hard times had not discouraged CSA subscriptions and Leigh calculated that out of about 500 subscribers, a dozen or so had recently "come up with excuses to back out." But wife Wenonah said others are joining, and not because they are fanatic about local food but because "they just don't trust the food at the supermarket anymore and they heard about us."

The Hauters were a bit aggravated when the visitors drove their vehicles over newly planted rye crops. The rye is a cover to provide fertility for fields where Leigh plans to plant vegetables in June. It looks just like grass, which it is. On a sloping area outside the greenhouse Leigh's field of garlic is several inches tall, the little plants raising their heads above a thick mulch of hay.

Bull Run Farm is set back in a narrow, thickly forested valley. It's hard to imagine how Leigh and Wenonah grow crops on the mountainside. But as you walk about, you see clearings here and there where a plastic-covered hoop house abuts a field, indicating an area that soon will be planted with broccoli and Chinese cabbage and sorrel.

This day temperatures would climb over 70 degrees. The last blast of winter was already fading into memory.

Breakfast

Poached eggs with fresh sausage patty and braised greens.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: None

A high-protein, low-carb breakfast for me means two eggs. I prefer them poached to avoid the greasy cleanup from fried eggs. As you can see, I also like my yolks runny.

In the past, I used toast to sop up the yolks and I was mighty frustrated for a time chasing the yolk around the plate without that handy piece of browned bread. Then it occurred to me to add some greens from our own garden to the plate. They do an excellent job of mopping up all that delicious yellowness, so full of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids as they come from eggs laid by hens that forage outdoors on a local farm.

My method of poaching eggs is to heat water in an iron skillet, season with white vinegar and bring to a strong simmer. I crack the eggs and release them gently into the water. Fresh eggs will hold together very well. (Old eggs tend to break apart--not good for poaching, better for hard-boiling.) After a few minutes, I remove the eggs with a slotted spoon. You can pat them dry with a paper towel--or not.

The greens were harvested last year and blanched before being frozen. After defrosting, I simply cook them in salted water until tender, then dress them with a bit of vinegar. Two years ago we helped slaughter pigs on our friend Brett's farm and came away with many pounds of sausage and sausage meat. The meat had been at the bottom of the freezer. We made several different kinds of sausage that year and I'm not sure which this is. I neglected to label it. A sandwich-size package made six patties that I baked off in the oven and have been eating over the last week.

This is the kind of breakfast that gets me out of bed in the morning.

The Truth about "Free Range" Eggs

I took my usual walk to the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday and was surprised to see that the West Virginia farm family from whom we buy eggs had dropped the price of a dozen 75 cents to $4.

"A sign of the times?" I asked the farm wife. I thought perhaps demand had fallen off because of the recession, nudging the price lower. She shook her head.

"Something like that," she said. "It really has to do more with the price of feed."

I just assumed she meant organic feed. Aren't all "free range" hens raised on organic feed? But again she shook her head. "Oh, these birds are all raised naturally out in our fields," she exclaimed. "No growth hormones. No antibiotics. But we don't use organic feed. Oh, no. The price would be way up here," and she raised her hand over her head to indicate a very tall price.

"So you just use the ordinary feed you get at the feed store?" I said.

"Yep," she said. "Just what they sell us at the local feed store."

I pondered that as I walked to the other end of the market, oggling the sweet potatoes and parsnips along the way. A little something about my understanding of natural farming had suddenly been cast in doubt. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

I came to the EcoFriendly food stall. EcoFriendly was an original partner with the famous Virginia grass farmer, Joel Salatin, and sells pasture-raised meats to the most exclusive restaurants in Washington. In fact, you could call EcoFriendly a darling of the hip chef set. They are now moving product into New York City. They drive a long way to showcase their beef, pork, lamb and chicken to the upscale crowd at Dupont Circle.

On the table next to a cooler full of chicken parts were displayed many dozens of eggs. They looked identical to the eggs from West Virginia, except they were in spanking new cellulose cartons with no store labels, not the recycled Styrofoam cartons so many egg farmers use. The price: $5.30 a dozen.

"Do you use organic feed?" I asked, seeking to find out why these eggs were so much more expensive than the ones I had just bought. The sales clerk looked stumped. She turned to one of her cohorts for an assist. "Do these chickens get organic feed?" she shouted over the din.

"The chickens are all raised naturally. No growth hormones. No antibiotics," the other clerk said, turning to look at me.

"Yes, but is the feed organic?" I pressed. "Because your eggs are $1.30 more a dozen than the eggs at the other end of the market. It seems the price of feed has dropped."

"Yes," he said. "It was a lot higher before, with all the ethanol...."

"So is your feed organic?" I asked again.

He looked at me hard. I thought I detected a little nod, meaning yes. But he didn't seem very sure. We locked eyes for a moment, but he added nothing more. I walked on.

Hmmmm. Price dropping on eggs from West Virginia because of a drop in cost of non-organic feed. Eggs much more expensive at swank meat emporium, feed undetermined. I was confused, but knew I had something new to consider in my egg shopping. Not only did I want my eggs coming from chickens raised naturally in the great outdoors, I wanted to feel comfortable about the way they were being fed. What's more important, being "free range" or eating organic feed? Did it matter?

I posed the question to our farmer friend Leigh Haughter who grows organic produce for 500 CSA subscribers on his farm in The Plains, Virginia. Leigh also raises chickens and sells egg shares. As he explained, it's very difficult to make a profit selling eggs. He doesn't use "organic" feed either. Not just because it's more expensive. It's not readily available in his area.

"I don't see how anyone really makes money out of eggs unless they are growing their own feed," Leigh said. " Which means having the land to raise the corn and other inputs into the feed. Chicken feed is where the profit is made."

He added that "free range" also is open to interpretation. His chickens don't actually roam around the farm. They're confined to a "tractor," or a pen built on wheels or a sled. The pen is typically surrounded with electrified fencing so the chickens have an area they can explore, pecking at the ground for insects and grass and grit. It's that outdoor foraging that raises the level of valuable omega-3 fatty acids in the eggs and gives the yolks a distinctively rich, orange color.

"Now a real organic, pastured chicken operation is costly in that first you are going to have to raise your own organic feed, and secondly you are going to have a lot of pasture," Leigh continued. "Chickens destroy pasture quickly, and if you aren't constantly moving them, they will turn wherever they are living into a bare, manure laden barnyard."

As it turns out, chicken feed typically is made locally from whatever grains are at hand--corn, soybeans, flax--and possibly rendered proteins from area slaughterhouses. Even other chickens, since chickens are omnivorous and don't think twice about eating their own kind.

So the question is more complicated than just feeding yourself from the local farmers market. It may be about supporting a local farmer, whether or not he is organically pure. But to do that you need to know more about the farmer. You need to ask a lot of questions. And you need to know what to make of the answers.

Being a locavore isn't always easy.

Note: We later contacted EcoFriendly foods and were told they don't advertise their eggs as "organic" and can't be sure what the chickens are fed because they come from "multiple producers" who are not required to use organic feed. You'll just have to guess why their eggs cost $1.30 more a dozen than the ones from a family farm in West Virginia.

Lunch

Egg and onion sandwich with homemade "crock" pickle.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: none

My wife declares this "the best" egg sandwich ever. It's made with a fresh pastured egg from Creekside Farm & Orchard in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Daughter and I walked to the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday and picked up a couple of dozen. (We used to get our eggs from farmer friend Brett's weekly winter CSA box. But we were unable to find a partner to share the CSA subscription this year. I feel terribly disloyal, but we must have our pastured eggs.)

The egg and its rich orange yolk were mixed with a bit of salt and pepper and quick-fried. We toasted slices of the multi-grain bread that we get delivered from our dairy, South Mountain Creamery. (It's a deliciously chewy bread that makes quite a trip, first baked in Ellicott City, Maryland, then trucked across the state to the dairy almost in West Virginia, then back to us in the District of Columbia. It arrives frozen but you'd never know once it is thawed.)

A little mayonnaise on the bread, some thinly sliced onion on the egg. The pickle is a sweet and sour variety that we put up last summer, just the thing to spice up this simple lunch.

Hard-Boiling Old Eggs

Even farmers advise letting eggs eggs grow old before trying to hard-boil them.

The reason is, as eggs get old they deteriorate. The egg's attachment to the inside of the shell grows weaker, making it easier to peel when hard-boiled. The membrane that holds the yolk in the center of the white also breaks down, which is why yolks sometimes end up in the strangest places when you hard-boil eggs.

However, there is a method for cooking new eggs that solves the peeling problem. And wouldn't you rather have a fresh egg in your salade Nicoise?

As it happens, I am cooking a dozen old eggs that we found one day on our doorstep. We still don't know who is leaving us eggs. But since they were beyond the "use by" date, I'm hard-boiling them.

The trick is to move the eggs back and forth bettween boiling water and ice water. This causes expansion and contraction between the shell and the egg inside, making peeling a breeze. The method is described in detail in Julia Child's The Way to Cook.

For a dozen eggs, place the eggs in the bottom of a tall stock pot and cover with 3 1/2 quarts of cold water. Over high heat, bring the water to a boil and immediately remove the pot from the heat. Cover the pot and let it sit for 17 minutes. Remove the eggs with a slotted spoon and transfer them to a large bowl of ice water.

While the eggs are sitting in the ice water, put the stock pot back on high heat and bring the water back to a boil. When it is boiling, transfer the eggs back to the pot for 10 seconds. Then move them back to the ice water.

When the eggs have cooled, you can crack the shells and peel them. The eggs should be perfectly cooked (none of that grey ring around the yolk) and easily peeled. Deviled eggs never looked better.

Lunch

Fried eggs with sauteed beet greens.

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Shopping: none

I can hardly think of a vegetable easier or more delectable then freshly harvested beet greens. I'd been eyeing one particular Franken-beet in our garden. It was unexpectedly huge, some kind of mutant, with greens towering over the rest of its mates. I was weeding in the area this morning and decided it was time to see what this fellow was all about. I pulled it up, and it looked like a giant, red parsnip. No accounting for a beet like that. But nothing goes to waste around the garden. If it's edible, it will be eaten.

I brought the greens inside, let them soak in the kitchen sink to refresh, then sauteed the leaves very simply in the cast iron skillet with extra-virgin olive oil, coarse salt and just the water left on the leaves after lifting them out of the sink. You could season the greens with a little white wine vinegar, or even cider vinegar.

Meanwhile, I melted a spoonful of butter from South Mountain Creamery in the non-stick skillet and fried a couple of eggs from our farmer friend Brett. (These would be the ones that require the five-mile drive to the Chevy Chase farmers market). Dust the eggs and greens with some grated Pecorino cheese. I dabbed some red Sriracha pepper sauce on there as well.

I'll be tasting this for the rest of the afternoon...

Breakfast

Fried eggs with last night's liver and onion scapes.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: none

Our onions lately have been sending up flower stalks, or scapes. You might read more about garlic scapes. But onion scapes are equally delicious, chopped fine as a garnish or as an ingredient. Pesto from scapes seems to be all the rage these days. We are happy to cut them off the onion plant and eat them, which forces the onion to focus more on what it does best--making onions.

In the winter we get eggs in our CSA box from our farmer friend Brett. Brett's chickens roam around a movable enclosure, pecking at weeds and bugs. In the warmer season we sometimes visit Brett's stand at a Saturday farmer's market a couple of miles away, specifically for the eggs.

You can identify eggs from free-roaming chickens immediately by the deep orange color of the yolk. That's the beta carotene from eating all those weeds. Industrial eggs come from chickens that are crammed together indoors. They feed on corn and soy. Instead of protein from bugs, they get theirs in a feed mix from all kinds of industrial sources: feathers and other chicken parts, beef fat, bone meal. Their yolks are pale yellow, absent the beta carotene.

Needless to say, eggs from pasture-raised hens are more nutritious. They have more in vitamins A and E, more folic acid, lutein and beta carotene. They are also dramatically richer in omega-3 fats.

Freshness and better nutrition are among the reasons we will sometimes make a special trip--and pay more--to get our eggs from a local farm. We also like the idea of supporting a local farmer.

Liver and egg yolks have the highest concentration of biotin--a B vitamin--of any foods. Biotin is vital for the digestion of fat and protein and also promotes healthy hair, skin and nerves. So next time you're thinking about liver, include an egg. Or, make chopped liver the old fashioned way--with chopped eggs.

Lunch

Salad greens from the garden with grated carrot, cherry tomatoes and leftover hard-boiled egg.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: none

Season with extra-virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar, a little salt, freshly ground black pepper.

Here's a question: Why are brown eggs more expensive in the grocery store than plain white eggs? The only difference between brown eggs and white eggs is that brown eggs are laid by brown chickens. My wife thinks this is simply a marketing scam perpetrated by the egg industry. Usually, we buy our eggs from a local farmer.

What do you think?

Baking Ain't For Sissies

What you see here is an angel food cake that started out with great hopes and expectations and ended in utter disaster.

Why, you might ask, is The Slow Cook making angel food cake? Shouldn't he be out tending his garden?

The short of it is, we had a freezer full of frozen egg whites from months of recipes calling mostly for egg yolks. The plan was to convert these whites into angel food cakes that I could deliver to the kids in my "food appreciation" classes as an end-of-year treat.

The first blunder was dumping a four-cup container of egg whites into the blender bowl. Somehow I had it in my head that this constituted one dozen eggs. In fact, four cups (almost) equates to 24 egg whites--something that was clearly indicated on the label my wife had affixed to the container. I soon realized my error when the eggs white under influence of a rapidly beating blender began overflowing the bowl.

After reading the recipe several times and having gotten the procedure more or less fixed in my head, my wife intervened, urging me to measure out the ingredients for both of the two cakes I had in mind, rather than doing them each separately. This is how time is saved in a busy kitchen, she intoned.

Not only did I measure out the dry ingredients for two cakes, I mixed them all together. But by some fiendish trick of physics, two cups of double-sifted cake flour mixed with three cups of granulated sugar does not result in five cups of material. Questioning my own sanity at this point, and after a brief huddle with the baking-expert wife, I decided that I must have forgotten two of the three cups of sugar, so I added two more.

This is how you end up with a sticky, treacly sweet angel food puddle rather than the light, fluffy angel food cake we had in mind. Make that two cakes down the drain.

Kids, I hope you like pound cake from Whole Foods.

Kids Make Asparagus Frittata

Asparagus has a special place in the heart of the vegetable gardener. Being a perenniel, asparagus needs only to be planted once. Then, without much additional care, it will produce an abundance of lovely, fresh spears of asparagus year after year--for 15 years or more.

Kids, it turns out, love asparagus as well. They like to look at it's funny, spear-like shape. They like to hold it. They like to snap off the ends. And they like to saw it into pieces with their plastic knives.

Asparagus has a flavor unique in the world of vegetables and, as anyone who has eaten it knows, asparagus also has a lasting effect that shows up in a strange, odiferous way later in the bathroom. According to food authority Harold McGee, humans metabolize a sulfur-conatining substance--aspargusic acid--a chemical closely related to the essence of skunk spray, methanethiol. Because of genetic variations, not all people produce methanethiol, but most do. Kids just giggle when you mention it. But for adults, it's always a comfort to know you can tell when spring has arrived by the smell of your pee.

Making an asparagus frittata is so quick and easy I decided we should prepare asparagus two ways in our classes this week. First we cooked whole spears using my favorite method--poaching them in a large skillet filled with simmering, salted water.

I showed the kids how to find the tough part of the asparagus stem by bending it until it snaps. After we trimmed all the asparagus, we cooked it until there was just a tiny bit of resistance to the tooth. The cooked asparagus are plunged immediately into a bath of cold water, then are drained on paper towels. We dressed the asparagus in a red wine-mustard vinaigrette. They very quickly disappeared.

For the frittata, we used 12 eggs and my big, non-stick skillet. But the procedure is the same for a smaller frittata. Grease the skillet lightly and begin heating it on the stove. Meanwhile, beat the eggs well.

For a six-egg frittata, have four spears of asparagus on hand, cooked and cut into 3/4-inch pieces. Reserve the asparagus tips. Scatter the asparagus pieces in the skillet, then pour in the eggs. As the eggs cook on the bottom, lift around the edges with a heat-proof spatula so that the uncooked egg runs underneath. Continue this process until the egg is almost completely cooked. Arrange the asparagus tips on top, then set the skillet under the broiler to finish cooking.

The frittata is done when it is golden brown and rises to about twice its original size. To serve, cut the frittata into wedges, drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and dress with grated Parmesan cheese. Consider serving it warm for breakfast or dinner, or as a room-temperatur appetizer or at the center of a composed salad. It also makes a dramatic display item on a Sunday brunch buffet, set on a ceramic stand and garnished with mustard blossoms.

Lunch: Gypsy Soup with Poached Egg

We have an abundance of local, farm-fresh eggs from our CSA box. I can't think of a better use than in the soup we made with our farmer friend Brett's sweet potatoes.

Call me a freak, but I love finding liquid yolk in my soup spoon. It adds a velvety touch to the broth.

I also added some leftover cannellini beans
from the fridge (there are garbanzo beans in the original soup).

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Shopping: none

Breakfast: Poached Egg & Praties

I'd been saving the potatoes recently harvested from our garden (yes, potatoes in February) for the arrival of some fresh eggs in our CSA box. Poaching works best with the freshest possible eggs, before the egg structure begins to deteriorate. This egg could not have been more than a couple of days old. It slid into the simmering water and held its shape in textbook fashion, then perched atop the previously boiled potato pieces. Season with a little salt, a little pepper, and a generous grating of Parmesan cheese.

After nibbing around the edges, the moment came to break the yolk. Deep, orange deliciousness oozes out and spreads among the tatties.

But the potatoes resist mopping up the yolk. After examining this scene for a moment, it occurs to me that my spuds need to be smashed. My fork does the job. Now I have a nice chunky mash of potato and yolk. Eggs and potatoes are wonderful things, and work quite well together.

Chicken Giblets for Breakfast

High on my list of personal foibles is my lack of fortitude when it comes to dealing with chicken organs.

You know what I'm talking about--the little bag of body parts--neck, heart, gizzard, liver--that comes with the chicken, usually stuffed inside the cavity. Our farmer friend Brett takes great pains to include a Ziploc bag with chicken parts when he sends one of his chickens with our weekly CSA box. I carefully remove the bag, place it in a small bowl and put it in the refrigerator with a promise to myself that I will--this time--find a use for my chicken offal very soon, to make good on all the work that went into harvesting them.

Days pass. I glance at the bowl of chicken parts each time I open the refrigerator. The promise to myself turns into guilt. I try to put giblets out of my mind, pretend they're not there. But soon they take on a metaphysical weight--a real presence in my thoughts--like something out of an Egar Allen Poe story. The beating chicken heart...

Eventually, my wife will complain of an odor eminating from the refrigerator. I pretend to not know what it is, and bury the chicken parts in the trash at the first opportunity when no one is looking. At this point, the guilt has become HUGE.

Well, I just hate to waste food and I keep telling myself that I will never collect enough chicken necks to make a stock. By now, if I had saved all those necks, I would have enough a couple times over. So this week after receiving another chicken from Brett, and the bag of organs, I was more determined than ever to make good use of them. Since I know no one else in the family will have anything to do with chicken offal, I decided to have giblets for breakfast with some of Brett's pastured eggs.

Here's what I did: First, place the neck in a freezer bag to finally start your collection. Put the bag in the freezer. Nex, cut the gizzard and heart into small pieces and sautee them in a hot skillet with extra-virgin olive oil. Season with salt and black pepper. When they are cooked through, spoon them onto a plate and set aside. Now cook the liver in the same skillet, either whole or cut into two pieces. Be sure to brown it on all sides. When that is cooked through, remove it to a cutting board and when it is cool enough to handle, cut it into small pieces.

Let the skillet cool a bit off the heat, then return it to the burner set to moderately-low and pour two farm-fresh eggs, beaten, into the skillet where the eggs can pick up all the brown bits off the bottom. Scramble the eggs as you normally would, mixing them around with your favorite usensil, and when they're about half-way cooked add the chopped giblets and mix them well with the eggs. Season with salt and pepper as needed.

Serve this immediately on a warm plate, perhaps with a piece of toasted, rustic bread. If you have any leftover giblet gravy in the fridge, now would be a good time to use that as well. We had some fresh chervil in our CSA box this week, so I chopped some of that to garnish the eggs.

I happen to like strong, gamey flavors, so this is a dish I could easily wake up to on a more regular basis. But my advise is, do this early in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up, so you don't have to listen to all those disapproving voices telling you how much they can't stand chicken giblets.

Kids Make 12-Egg Frittata

Last week we made deviled eggs in my "food appreciation" classes. As part of that exercise, I wanted the kids to get the feel of an egg--literally. We broke eggs into individual bowls and all the kids had a chance to pick it up with their hands, feel the difference between the yolk and the white, and let the whites slither through their fingers.

They loved the touchy-feely component of that lesson and it resulted in a lot of separated eggs. What to do with them? Some kids suggested muffins. There were votes for a cake. Another thought scrambled eggs would be a good use.

Well, we had enough eggs for a couple hundred muffins, and many, many cakes. The simplest solution, it seemed to me, was a frittata. So I brought my big, non-stick skillet to class this week along with a variety of components. The class divided into teams, each responsible for one component.

There was a broccoli team, responsible for dividing a head of broccoli into small florets. There was a Parmesan team, responsible for grating cheese. There was a roasted red pepper team, responsible for getting the peppers out of a jar and placing them on the frittata in a decorative fashion.

Meanwhile, I sauteed some sliced red onion very aggressively on the stove top. Setting that aside, I got the skillet good and hot and showed the kids what happened when I ladled some of our beaten egg mixture into the smoking skillet. Of course it sizzled and bubbled and began to brown around the edges. We added more egg, and I demonstrated how to use a heat-proof spatula to lift the cooked egg around the edges and tilt the skillet, so that the egg liquid would find a new place to cook.

We cooked the broccoli and the kids took turns adding that, the onion, the roasted red pepper and finally the cheese to our frittata. Then under the broiler it went to puff up and brown.

"Now, how do I get it out of the pan?" I asked the class.

I took bets on my getting the frittata out of the pan and onto a cutting board intact. Of course I won. The frittata slid right out, right on cue. We practiced some simple fractions, slicing the frittata into wedges. Then the kids wolfed it down.

Never has an egg--or a broccoli floret--been so popular.

Kids Make Perfect Deviled Eggs

Did you know there's a technique for making perfect hard-boiled eggs?

Most people probably figure this is a cinch. Just cover the eggs with water and boil. Or, boil water and drop in the eggs.

For years I've been following my wife's method: cover eggs with cold water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then remove from the heat and let the eggs sit.

I wanted to teach this to the kids in my "food appreciation" classes. I figured six eggs in each class would be enough to make a deviled egg for everyone. So how much water to put in the pot and how long to sit?

My wife wasn't sure, so we went to the source: Julia Child's The Way to Cook. There, Child details an elaborate method for hard-boiling eggs that involves heating the eggs, then transferring them to an ice bath, then back into boiling water, then back into the ice bath. She also gives very specific amounts of water to use depending on the number of eggs. The length of time the eggs sit in the hot water after coming to a boil is always the same: 17 minutes.

That's much longer than what my wife told me. No wonder my yolks were always a bit soft.

Eggs are sold unfertilized and consist of three basic components: the yolk, or yellow part; the albumen, or white part, and the chalazae, which are cloudy strands like umbilical chords connecting the yolk to the white.

I had the kids separate eggs by hand just so they could feel the whites slither through their fingers and handle the yellow globes of yolk.

To demonstrate to the kids what happens when an egg cooks, I cracked one open into a skillet and fried it from the top with my kitchen torch. The kids marveled at how the proteins in the albumen seized up and turned from clear to white. In just a couple of minutes, the egg was cooked and they greedily ate it.

Meanwhile, I had a small pot of water with just a teaspoon of vinegar coming to a boil. I brought that to our demonstration table and cracked an egg into the water. The kids thought that was pretty gross. But soon enough, a poached egg emerged and they couldn't wait to dig into that as well.

All this time I'd had six eggs in 2 1/2 quarts of water (use a tall, rather than wide, pot--uncovered--for this) coming to a boil on the stove. As soon as it starts to boil, remove the pot, cover it and let the eggs sit for 17 minutes exactly. At the end of 17 minutes, transfer the eggs to a large bowl of iced water and put the pot back on the heat to return to a boil. Leave the eggs in the iced water for precisely 2 minutes. Remove them, and when the water on the stove comes back to a boil, plunge the eggs into the pot. Wait until the water again comes to a boil, count 10 seconds, then immediately remove the eggs, placing them back in the ice bath. They are now done.

Whew.

Why all this back and forth? Chilling the eggs after cooking helps separate the albumen from the inside of the egg shell. Fresh eggs especially have a tendency to stick to the inside of the shell, which makes them difficult to peel. We've all experienced the hard-boiled egg that ended up a cratered mess because the shell just didn't want to come off.

If your yolks come out with a greenish-grey lining after you hard-boil them, you've cooked them too long. Egg whites contain a certain amount of sulfur that slowly decomposes into hydrogen sulfide (source of the famous rotten egg smell). Heating the egg greatly accelerates the decomposition process and the hydrogen sulfide migrates toward the yolk, where it combines with the iron in the yolk to make that dark ring. When eggs are cooked just long enough, the yolk comes out solid with no dark ring.

And why do your eggs crack when you boil them? First, eggs contain a small pocket of air that expands during cooking and can crack the egg. To let the air out, use a small trussing skewer or needle to make a hole at the blunt end of the egg. Plunge the skewer into the egg 1/4-inch. Secondly, cold eggs will crack if placed in hot water. Cover the eggs with cold water and bring them both up to heat: The chances of cracking are much less.

If somehow you should mix your hard-boiled eggs with your fresh eggs, how do you tell them apart? Try spinning them on your countertop. Fresh eggs will not spin. Hard-boiled eggs spin like a top.

Our hard-boiled eggs came out perfectly. The yolks were solid with no tell-tale ring. We sliced them in half lengthwise, then mashed the yolks with a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, about 1/4 cup mayonnaise and a generous pinch of salt. Then the kids took turns filling the eggs. Garnish with a sprinkle of paprika or chopped chives.

"Delicious!" the kids declared. And you know, they were.

Note: Julia Child says that to hard-boil 1 to 4 eggs, use 2 quarts of water; for 12 eggs, 3 1/2 quarts of water; for 24 eggs, 6 quarts of water. Do not attempt to cook more than 24 eggs at a time.

Breakfast

Poached egg with greens and grated Parmesan.


Preparation time: 10 minutes


Shopping: None


We ate unconscionable amounts yesterday. There was no question but the thing to have for breakfast was something simple and reassuring.



Poaching an egg is as simple as bringing a small pot of water to a simmer. Add a tablespoon of white vinegar to help hold the egg together. It's always best to use the freshest possible egg for poaching. Old eggs like to fall apart. In this case, the egg is laid by a pastured hen and comes in our weekly CSA box.



The greens also come in the CSA allotment and were cooked ahead, just waiting in the fridge. I heat them separately in the microwave and season with coarse salt, ground pepper and a splash of white wine vinegar.



When the egg is ready (meaning the white just barely cooked and the yolk runny--my preference), remove it from the water with a slotted spoon, place on top of the greens and grate Parmesan cheese all over. Give it another grind of pepper.



The yolk and greens go so well all mixed together. The only thing that could improve this might be a wee glass of Chablis to treat the head from last night's festivities.