Category Archives: Eggs

Eggs, Food, Pia, scratch cooking, Uncategorized

My Mom’s Potato Salad

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When my mom was a young mother in the 50’s, she spent a lot of time cooking and making up recipes. One of her meals was a potato salad that was a little different from the common one of the time, and a steak marinade.

The potato salad? At a grill out, I made a huge batch of it. One of the guests who tried it then brought *every new guest* over to it telling them to eat it, because it was so good.

I don’t think it’s *that* good, but it is extremely tasty. It’s a kind of bland plain 50’s potato salad (no pickles, no celery, no mustard, yes eggs) with Bacon added.

Y’see, my mom had married a kid of German descent, and her Mother in Law made the traditional hot potato salad that has bacon in it.  My mom looked at it and said ‘that would be good in plain potato salad’. And it is. I mean, how could it not be? So, it’s a plain, fatty potato salad with bacon. And eggs. Yeah. You eat it because it’s fatty. Mmmmmmm, fat….

All summer long, she’d make her steak and this potato salad, and even though she died a few years ago, I get to feel like we are home again when I make them.


I recently was asked if I’d be willing to share my mom’s steak marinade, and since I was making it for today anyway, I figured why not. And then I can’t picture the steak without this salad, so you have both! And like that woman who had her fudge recipe on her tombstone for all to enjoy, I know my mom would love to live on in other people’s cooking. Even if they change it to fit their tastes, like she changed recipes to fit her. So go ahead, add the pickle and celery and whatever else you think would work. I have actually in the past *drained the bacon grease* into the salad as well.

You did good, mom. <3 you and miss you.

Go here for Pia’s Steak.

For this you need

I use my Instant Pot and do my potatoes and eggs at the same time. Makes it harder to get salt in the potatoes, but harder to mess up.

4 cups of potatoes- salted, boiled, cooled, diced

2 hard boiled eggs- boiled, peeled, and diced (I do both of these in the instant pot. These were small so they got 7 minutes. I then peeled then, diced them and salted them.

1 finely chopped onion (about 1 cup of onion.)

1 tsp salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

5 sliced cooked diced bacon (I used three extra thick slices and drained them this time)

~1 cup mayo (add more if you like it gooey. I do.)

And the proof this dates to the 1950’s, after all the above is mixed well, paprika! It’s not just to decorate it. A nice hot paprika adds nice flavor to it.

And there you have it.

Pia’s steak, her potato salad and sauteed spinach. Dinner was silent because no one wanted to stop eating…
Eggs, Food, health, pulses, weight loss, weight loss

Make Your Own Beans or Ful Medames

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This morning I stepped on the scale and the number had gone up instead of down or staying in place. I had had nothing planned for dinner tonight (late on menu planning) so I have decided to make what our son lovingly called ‘make your own beans’ when he was a toddler. It’s basically an ancient recipe and possibly one if the oldest street foods, so I have been told. All it is is beans, cooked, served with seasonings- traditionally salt, olive oil, garlic and pepper.

Variations include cooking eggs in their shells with the beans and adding onion skins or coffee to the cooking liquor. We’ve decided that coffee makes the best ful for us, so that’s what I now use. 🙂 I also prefer darker beans for this recipe, as it’s dependent on the beans for flavor.

So I am going to start with three cups of these dark red beans (about a pound) in the pressure cooker. This would feed four people, if they like beans.

Then I nestle six eggs in the beans.

And then I add about a cup of brewed coffee and a quart of water. If I were using anything other than my Instant Pot, I would add more water and watch it more. I have made this in the slow cooker, on the range and in the oven. I have not yet tried it in the ashes of a campfire, but I really want to. 🙂

And that is it. Cool until the beans are done. I have all day and the pot will take under an hour. Other cooking versions take different times. The next step will come at serving, so by the magic of the internet…

Here are the beans, done and able to be crushed by the back of a spoon.

They will sit like that until serving time. Which is now. 🙂 We have sourdough bread, salt, oil, pepper and fresh garlic.

You can mash it together and serve like hummus. Make it into a wrap. Serve as a side dish. Skip the egg. Add tomato, chili, parsley, any seasoning you want. It’s a simple, healthy, filling meal that should be on rotation in any home that loves pulses.

Eggs, Food

Eggs, part one. Of many.

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Eggs part 1

 

Eggs are amazing. Even merely as a foodstuff, they are just incredible.

 

They are portable, healthy, convenient, cheap, tasty, and easy to cook or incredibly showy, depending on what you do with them. And they are one of the original ‘fast foods’— when we domesticated chickens 5000 years ago a side effect was a calorie dense, protein rich, portable food.

 

They are full of the amino acids that help build muscle (leucine). They have choline which is helps your brain think, focus and motivate (wow— I think I need more eggs for breakfast!). Choline also helps your liver do its job.

 

And if you remember the scare about eggs and heart disease in the 1980’s (possibly like me you had a mother who threw them all away at that point, along with bacon and ham and whatever other food was being vilified at the time), it’s interesting to note that they are now saying that apparently there is no measurable increased risk of heart disease with moderate egg consumption (7 whole eggs a week) unless you are a diabetic. In a study of nearly 120,000 people, that’s what they came up with.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10217054?dopt=Citation

 

And actually, if you are at risk for macular degeneration and eye cataracts, you’re best to eat eggs, because eggs protect the eye.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16340654?dopt=Citation

 

However, they do say that is you have heart disease already, or have already had a stroke, then you may be good avoiding more than three eggs yolks a week. That leaves you all the whites you could want, though.

 

So, as with pretty much everything you’ll see from me, eggs are great in moderation. Eat them without fear, but not all of them at once. And watch what you eat them with— They™ are thinking that since eggs are often served with high fat, high sodium foods, it could be merely that eggs like associating with trouble makes, not that they are in themselves troublemakers.

 

Right now, I will start with what makes them one of the most magical foods we can eat. The chemistry in the simple egg, that makes it into the magician it can be.

 

Let’s start with the yolk. The gooey, rich golden part that dribbles onto the potatoes or that you dip your toast into for breakfast foods. But it’s not just the xanthophyll— the yellow in the yolk that can add its color to make food pretty

 

It’s also capable of convincing acid and fat (two of my favorite things) to stick together, to get their combined flavor into your mouth in an unctuous smoothness. Every one knows that oil and water don’t mix, but we also know that things like mayonnaise and hollandaise are delicious, and most of us know that eggs are part of that. And it’s the chemistry of the egg yolk that does it. Eggs have some amino acids that repel water, and some that attract water. But it’s not just that. The lethicin, which is a phospholipid (part fat, part salt) is sort of like a tadpole, who likes sticking it’s head in water and its tail in fat. So you have your mayo and hollandaise so irresistible.

 

So when you mix that egg yolk into your butter and lemon juice combination, you get the double force of the amino acids and the lethicin working to make some parts of the yolk stick to the lemon juice while other parts will stick to the butter, and you can dip your tater tots into a little bit of heaven.
I’m paranoid about my eggs, and like them cooked, so I make my hollandaise sauce in a double boiler, although many people will say you can do it fine in a blender. If I had a friend with chickens, I’d do that, but I don’t right now.

 

½ cup of butter, cut up into dice. Reserve ½!

2 egg yolks

1T lemon juice

1 tsp minced garlic, shallot, green onion, whatever you have

black pepper

melt the ¼ cup butter in the double boiler. Add the rest of the ingredients, and mix well. When it is all melted and mixed, add the last of the butter and remove from heat while stirring. Serve immediately.