There's no food! There's just ingredients!

I'm sure more than a few of you have yelled that more than once. I do it frequently and this weekend I decided to do something about it. I considered making sous vide egg bites, but a) I am running low on room in my fridge and b) I wanted to stuff the freezer for the future and the jarred bites really should be eaten pretty quickly.

So, why not breakfast burritos? I first came across a breakfast burrito in 1989 in Albuquerque. I was moving for a job from Long Island to Prescott, Arizona. My friend Jason drove with me. He was great company. We mooed at a lot of cows, noted the frequent number of Yellow trucks, and I swear every time we changed states and found a new Top-40 radio station, the Bangles' Eternal Flame came on.

Anyway, our comment at the fast food joint was something along the lines of, "What the f*** is a breakfast burrito?"  Then I was in love. Warm, comforting, convenient, cheesy.

While I'm looking for a job, I'm keeping expenses down, so while I would have loved some chorizo, that will be for a later time. Instead, I grabbed a can of black beans. The whole ingredient list:

• 8 8-inch tortillas (mine came from The Tortilla Factory, and were bog-standard white flour)
• 6 eggs--taken out of the fridge a couple hours before I got going. Cooking with room-temperature eggs just works better.
• 1 can of black beans
• 6 ounces of cheddar, grated. Next time with the black beans, I will get pepper jack
• 3 green onions, chopped
• 1/2 cup green salsa that I found in the fridge
• 3 few shakes of Dave's Habanero Powder (I still don't remember buying this or getting it as a gift)
• 3 shakes of oregano  It might not have been Mexican oregano, but I don't think the Oregano Police are a thing.
• 2 shakes chili powder

A lot of the recipes I looked at had potatoes in them, but I've recently learned how to make Spanish Tortilla  (and I still need to blog about it) and right now, if I'm doing potatoes with eggs, this is how.

I drained the black beans and put them in the largest bowl I had, followed by the green onions, then the salsa, then the spices. Stirred well with a rubber scraper. I started the eggs and alternately kept an eye on the eggs (I always start my eggs in a cold pan on low, gradually increasing temperature to medium-low), and grated the cheese.

When I make scrambled eggs, I do my initial stirring with a whisk once they've been on a the heat for a few minutes. That will usually pull some nice big curds off the bottom. When the mix is about 50/50 curds and runny egg, I switch to a silicone scraper and gently fold them over once in a while. You don't want to scramble them too much. Once I felt they were done, they got stirred into the bowl with all the other goodies.

If you look away from this blog entry when you're making it, please make sure you read this part: Use warm tortillas. They are much more flexible. I zapped mine individually in the microwave for 30 seconds between paper towels. No tearing whatsoever. 

Also this: use a little water (just brush it on with your fingertip) to make the parts of the tortilla stick together when you're folding and rolling.

I spread out my silicone baking mat, lay down a tortilla and put about 1/3 cup of the mixture on the bottom third, and pulled up the bottom like a tab (there's only one of me, I can't take pics of me folding a burrito). Then just like wrapping the sandwiches  I used to make for my school lunches, I folded the sides over so all the filling was kind of in a pocket and then rolled, wetting the top  before I finally sealed it. I let them sit seam-side down while they cooled, then individually wrapped them in parchment paper before bagging and freezin.

My most sincere apologies. I did take pictures, but they came out twelve kinds of terrible.  The burritos themselves are kind of cute and rather trapezoidal. I had enough for 8 burritos and one taco, which was breakfast.

If you try this, please let me know!

Another Nifty Guest Post: Not quite carnitas

It's been a while since I've had a guest post from Ny  and I've been meaning to post this one for a while.  I haven't tried this one yet, but chuck roast goes on sale every so often, and I'm considering doing this on a smaller scale and making some fat quesadillas with it. 

On with the guesting!

So a friend gave me boar loin

I have the world's most awesome friends, I really do. Because of one them, I got to try a boar loin for the first time and I was delighted once I figured out what to serve with it.

When I went cruising for ideas, there were a lot of recipes with a fruit sauce. Black currant and red wine was tempting. I've done that with duck and it came out quite nice. After a lot of searching, I found a recipe and promptly forgot to bookmark it. All I could remember is it contained two kinds of whiskey (and I had both some bourbon and a bottle of Seagram's 7 in the cabinet), mushrooms, and cream. After checking that butter & cream were okay to serve my guest, away I went.

Everything that went in the meal:

In the vacuum bag

• 1.5 pounds of boar loan
• Salt
• Pepper
• Lots of fresh thyme

In the sauce:

• 6 oz crimini mushrooms
• One shallot, finely diced
• 1 teaspoon butter
• Bourbon
• Seagram's 7 (a straight whiskey, more on that later)
• Salt
• Pepper
• Thyme
• Cream
• The juices from the sous vide bags

In the oven:

• a 9x9 casserole dish with a layer of cubed rutabaga
• Salt 
• Papper
• Olive oil  finished with 
• 1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
• Parsley

Also on the stove

• 8 ounces trimmed green beans
• these would be blanched in boiling water for about 3 minutes--start testing when they're bright green, then tossed with a little butter & lemon zest.
• 
  

This is going to get long, but it was so delicious, I forgot to photograph it.

More research was needed before I got started as I've cooked pork loin before, but not boar, which is a bit leaner.  If you'd like a good reference for time & temp for pork sous vide, I suggest this page from Serious Eats. Yes, if you keep pork cooking long enough, even at a much lower temperature than you're used to, it will pasteurize just fine. I decided to go for 135 degrees F for two hours. I seasoned the boar with salt & pepper and vacuum-sealed it in a bag with a lot of fresh thyme. Then I got to cutting things up.

I cut up a few small rutabagas into approximately 1-inch (2.6 cm) cubes and set them aside. A little later, I would roast them in olive oil and roast at 425 F (218C, 491K) for about an hour, then toss with a little apple cider vinegar and sprinkle with parsley. 

Next up, the slicing of a 6 oz package of crimini (the ones they now call baby bellas) mushrooms, and the fine dicing of a shallot. I threw the mushrooms into a non-stick pan and turned the heat to medium-low. 

You might have noticed that I didn't add any oil or butter or any other liquid yet. I forget where I picked this up, but I have learned if you sweat your mushrooms when they are dry, they will give you some delightful liquid and their flavor will also be nicely concentrated. Once the mushrooms were reduced in size by half, I set them aside to melt half a tablespoon of butter in the pan. Once melted, I added the shallot, stirring constantly until it was golden brown. Once I hit that point, I added the mushrooms back in, and then a bit of salt & pepper.

Time for the booze! This recipe would be lovely with cognac, but I was low on it, and I had plenty of bourbon and a big bottle of Seagram's 7. If you aren't familiar with the types of whiskey, you can either borrow one of my favorite people or you can read this quick overview. Either one will be educational, though the human factor is much more entertaining.

I started adding the booze one Tablespoon at a time, tasting here and there. I ended up with a 3:2 ratio of bourbon vs straight whiskey. I added enough to cover the mushrooms, turned the heat down, and added cream to cover, and got the heat down to low. Then I set aside 3 Tablespoons of bourbon & 2 Tablespoons of straight whiskey into a measuring cup.

When the sous vide cooking was done, I cut open the bags, removed the loins to a cooling rack that I had prepped on the counter with paper towels underneath it. The juice from the bags got stirred into the sauce. I gently patted the loins dry with a paper towel and heated some safflower oil in a pan on medium-high until it started smoking. 

The loins got seared for a scant minute on each side, then put on a plate and covered with foil to rest. I deglazed the pan with the booze I'd set aside, scraping all the brown bits into the liquid, the poured in the rest of the sauce and turned the heat down.

The beans cooked while the meat rested, which gave me time to pull the neeps out of the oven (I love saying neeps and have it mean something). They got tossed with vinegar and parsely.

From there, it was slice, serve, and enjoy with a bottle of Bordeaux.