deep-fried poached egg with creamed spinach

I’m rather fond of putting eggs on top of things.  For a long time I merely slid them onto tried-and-true platforms like toast or hash browns, but these days I also like to scramble them into fried rice, crack them onto pizza dough, or fry them up with strips of stale tortillas and toss the whole mess with salsa and sliced avocado.  I’m not alone in this enthusiasm; Bon Appétit recently predicted that anything with an egg on top would be 2009’s dish of the year. 

Having spent the better part of my morning carefully poaching, breading, and then deep-frying an egg, I’d like to nominate this particular preparation for 2009’s egg of the year.  Or something like that.  Because a deep-fried poached egg rocks.  I mean, you probably don’t want to have one every morning unless you’re on some sort of Homer Simpsonesque weight-gain regimen, but the combination of crispy crust, tender white and soft, runny yolk is fan-freakin’-tastic.

quick puff pastry + rustic rosemary tart

You know those furrowed-brow-type people you see  in the grocery store picking up packages of this or that, frowning at labels and then returning the offending products to the shelf with a disgusted little shake of their heads?  I am one of those people.  I like to think I’m not the only one of those people, but it stands to reason that if there were more of us the labels wouldn’t be quite so full of unpronounceable bullshit.  Which brings me to the puff pastry.  

Unless you live near a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods (I don’t) and are comfortable spending six or seven dollars on a sixteen ounce package of crap-free frozen puff pastry (I’m not), your choices are limited:  Pepperidge Farm in all of its partially hydrogenated glory or nothing at all.  I’ve generally gone with the nothing at all option, but after years of rejecting scads of perfectly delicious-sounding tart recipes, I had a puff pastry epiphany.  ”How hard can it be?” I thought, and set about gathering the necessary ingredients.  

butternut squash, caramelized onion & goat cheese tart

I know what you’re thinking.  It’s the same thing Chris has been thinking — often aloud — for the past few weeks:  squash again?  And, well, yes.  Because even the teensiest of winter squashes tend to weigh nearly a pound, which is rather a lot for two people, and one can only fit so much squash purée in one’s freezer.  Extra squash is inevitable, and the unused portion will languish in the depths of your fridge, feeling sorry for itself and gazing forlornly at you each time you reach in for some fresh new food until eventually you think to yourself, “Shit, I should really use up that squash.”

baked pumpkin stuffed with bread and cheese

I’ve developed a bit of a thing for this baked pumpkin.  It all started back in October.  We’d planned a Halloween party and I had my heart set on baking something — maybe soup — inside a pumpkin, mostly because I thought it would look cool.  But really.  Who wants to stand around at a party eating soup?  So I scrapped the baked pumpkin idea and then, when Chris got sick, the party itself. Which worked out rather nicely, because you know what’s great for sick people? Soup.

I’d originally intended to fill the pumpkin with cream and gruyère, but my cheesemonger sent me home with three other fancy cheeses and this recipe in Gourmet persuaded me to add bread to the mix, making the resulting dish less a soup than a warm bowl of soft, gooey cheesy goodness.

homemade ricotta

I’ve been meaning to make fresh ricotta ever since I opened Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and read, “Yes, you can make cheese, and I strongly urge you to give it a try.”  (Well, okay then, I think I will.)  But I hadn’t gotten around to it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was my suspicion that ricotta might be a gateway cheese:  one day you’re happily boiling store-bought milk in your kitchen and the next you’re trying to convince your boyfriend that there’s really no reason not to keep just one or two small goats in the backyard.

Well, ricotta made; suspicions confirmed.  Oh wait.  Have I moved on to goats while you’re still back there wondering why anyone in their right mind would make something that’s readily available at even the lamest of grocery stores?