Doughnuts...must make doughnuts. A Winchell's like cake doughnut. This is what I woke up thinking yesterday morning. I don't even know why, but I had to do it. Now, since I didn't plan this thing out I wanted a fast easy recipe. And so the internet search began. I kept thinking I had found the recipe, then I would scroll down to the bottom and find that it needed 1 to 4 hours in the fridge before making it.
Argg! I want doughnuts now, not in 4 hours. (Yes, I was a little impatient. Sometimes instant gratification is a good thing.)
Well, the search continued until I found this recipe for Cake Doughnuts. I set to work right away. This recipe is so easy to make and the flavor of the doughnuts plain is great. After frying and cooling for a bit I coated half of the doughnuts with powdered sugar and the other half with cinnamon sugar (3/4 to 1 cup sugar + 1 tablespoon cinnamon).
The recipe makes 2 dozen doughnuts which meant we had a lot of leftovers. After the extra doughnuts cooled I put them away in an airtight container. This morning I ate one and I am not sure, but I think they are even better today then they were yesterday. Either way, this is a super easy recipe with great flavor and I will be using it in the future. Happy doughnutting!
Since we get so many visitors to our site looking for Pain Perdu recipes and the like, I figured I'd make a little mashup of recipes from around the web. Maybe soon, I shall make the Pain, and consume the Pain, but for now, I shall impart some Pain on you.
Note: PP == Pain Perdu. That is all.
And the one I am probably going to make, when I make it:
And yes, I'm well aware that Pain Perdu is basically French Toast. WHY MUST YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM ME!?!?
Tele was hard at work on his new job, we had little food in the house and I was left in charge of dinner.
This is not a good thing, I make desserts not dinner. I decided to give it a go. First things first what ingredients do we
have available? I found: eggs, potatoes, and a block of medium cheddar. Sounded like a frittata waiting to happen.
So I checked out some frittata recipes. All of which had a miriad of ingredients that I did not have available.
I found a recipe at Epicurious
that I felt I could modify to fit my on hand ingredients. And so the frittata experiment began. FYI: a frittata is sort of a quiche
without a crust.
Potato & Cheese Frittata
- 6 large eggs
- 1 to 1 1/2 cups cheddar
- 3/4 teaspoon salt (I used sea salt)
- 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
- 1/4 of a white onion, chopped
- 4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
- 3 tablespoons olive oil, divided (well, bummer we are out of that too. I had to settle for vegtable oil)
- 1/2 lb boiling potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1/4 inch chunks (I used 3 small russets)
|
|
Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Add in the cheddar, salt, and pepper.
Preheat broiler.
Cook onions & garlic in 1 tablespoon olive oil in a 10 inch heavy skillet (cast iron is preferable, but oven proof is necessary).
Stir over medium heat for about 1 minute until golden. Using a slotted spatula or spoon transfer the onion & garlic to a small bowl.
Put the potatoes with 1 tablespoon olive oil into the skillet. Cook over medium/high heat for about 6 minutes or until they are tender.
Add to the potates in the skillet the final tablespoon of olive oil and the onions & garlic. Spread out evenly.
Pour the egg mixture over the potatoes, onions, & garlic. Cook over medium/high heat for approximately 3 minutes, lifting up the cooked egg around the edges to allow the uncooked egg flow underneath.
Reduce the heat to medium and cover, cook for 5 minutes. (center will still be liquidy)
Uncover and transfer the entire pan to the oven. Broil 5 to 7 inches away from the heat for approximately 5 minutes. Frittata is finished when knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Be careful not to overcook or it will be a bit dry.
Slice into wedges and serve. Yield: 2-4 servings
 |
The verdict: Everyone liked it lots. Yeah! I cooked an edible dinner. The boy and I ate ours with catsup, the Tele with some added pepper. If I can make this one, so can you. Do yourself a favor and try it some time. Let me know how your house likes it. |
While I'm still at the point where every bechamel has a fifty percent chance of turning into gruel, I can admit with some well-deserved selling-out shame that I can do French Toast just as well as anyone else.
With indeterminate origins shrouded in the mists of time, French Toast (known colloquially in some American regions as 'Fried Eggy Bread', to the sounds of every dead Frenchman spinning violently in his grave) is known by several names throughout the world, including Bombay Toast, arme riddere ('poor knights'), and the term en francais, pain perdu.
Regardless of its origin, I got up this morning determined to eat something other than cereal or pork chops in hot sauce, so I started poking through the pantry looking for things that I might have, at one point in time, heard of as a potential ingredient in french toast. Unfortunately, her Tartiness immediately sensed the twinging of directionless fumbling resonating from deep within my Y chromosome, and hauled out her favorite french toast recipe.
As I reluctantly set down the Clabber Girl (we might have had an interesting breakfast indeed) and perused the recipe, my inherent fiddliness blossomed into full-on transmogrification mode. I mean, the recipe she gave me had six ingredients. Six! I believe in simplicity for simplicity's sake as much as the next man, but this morning I was feeling much more Da Vinci than Kazimir Malevich, and ornery besides. I glanced longingly at the Clabber Girl. Her disturbingly large Victorian eyes seemed to be pleading with me to ignore the pragmatic whims of my wife and instead follow her down a psychedelic yellow brick road of chaos, pestilence, and creative breads.
Unfortunately, looking at the bread and thinking 'yellow brick' inspired in me an unsettling urge to return to simplicity.
In a Pyrex baking dish, I added the two eggs, mixed in brown sugar (take that, recipe), and mixed in the rest of the ingredients in old-school eyeballing fashion. Since it was French toast that I was making, I used half a stick of butter and made sure to scorch each piece slightly.
The result was delicious- but heavy. Brown sugar and butter with a particularly absorbent bread do indeed yellow bricks make. Though they were pleasantly crunchy in a waffle-like fashion, they weren't too sweet, and didn't mind being dusted with confectioner's sugar (I think it was confectioners sugar, but where did little miss Clabber go?), nor did they mind a little pure maple in the tradition of the great French Toast Eating Lumberjacks that used their mighty axes to pave the way to our modern landscape of McDonalds and california rolls. I only managed to eat one piece, but the other slices quickly disappeared due to guerilla action from the other family members. Let freedom ring.
I was going to make pancakes for breakfast this morning, but that plan was foiled. Then I remembered this muffin recipe I had seen in Family Fun Magazine for French Breakfast Muffins. (You know my tendency towards desserts and sweets!) They have this great section called “Let's Cook†where they give you recipes that are simple enough to cook with your kids. Tele is much more patient with LittleRoq than I when it comes to cooking in the kitchen, but this was one recipe I thought I could tackle with him. Sure enough LittleRoq and I survived the experience with him doing most of the mixing and then spooning into the muffin stone (Pampered Chef of course). These muffins have a mild sweetness to them so everyone including Tele (who doesn't have much of a sweet tooth) enjoyed them. In searching Google I found that there are many similar recipes available out there so you should be able to find one to suite your fancy.
I think this would be a great recipe to use as a mix from your pantry. Just decide how many batches you would like to have on hand. Mix up the dry ingredients according to the directions and place in a zip-top baggie. Voila! Your very own muffin mix with no preservatives.
