Saturday, April 05, 2008

Breakfast!

Break out the wok, we're cookin'!

You're gonna need eight eggs or equivalent egg product. You're gonna need a couple boxes of frozen pre-cooked sausage links, any flavor, or a can of Spam, or the GNP of Bolivia's worth of microwavable bacon. You're gonna need a bag of frozen tater crowns (the flattened tater tots), or frozen seasoned potato chunkettes, or frozen hash browns, up to you. You're gonna need a bunch of green onions, chopped. And you're gonna need a bag of shredded cheese, you can pick the flavor/blend. Your grocer will provide.

You're also gonna need a couple of friends with minimal standards in food. Depending on how minimal, exactly, you can also have on hand chopped dill pickles, leftover white rice, grits, english muffins, Tabasco, sour cream, and catsup. Arguably you can use hot dogs in place of the meat, but that's kind of tacky.

You want everything in bite-sized pieces, basically. Then you dump some vegetable oil in your wok, and start with the largest pieces. (Eggs last!) This will generally be the potatoes, unless you're using sausages or shredded hash browns. The hash brown bits require less cooking time, the sausages more. You know how this works. As each ingredient becomes fully cooked, add the next sized item. You can move your stuff around to keep some of it from getting overcooked, but there's a limit to how well that works.

My wok is an electric wok, with a nonstick coating. I love that thing, and if it could make conversation I'd have already thrown over the SpotBot for it as Household Appliance I Would Most Like To Marry. So it's ideal for this sort of thing, and you may have more problems with the final step, which is urgently-whisked eggs or egg product, delivered in a hurry over the other items. Stir! It's a wok, that's what you're supposed to be doing! You should have just enough time to add a little pepper and maybe some salt before the eggs start to cook hard, and then you need to keep stirring so the other breakfasty goodness gets well distributed in the clumps.

Yummy, scrambled eggs with all the fixings! Apply cheese or condiments to taste, and wait for your friends to say something like "Hell, this is actually edible, what gives?"

Or you can always add food coloring.

8 comments:

Julia said...

ZOMG, you totally posted something!

Not that I'm not the last person to call anyone on that, but gee whiz, it's been ages.

So I volunteered to show the parents at my kid's school how to cook something italian that isn't pasta and red sauce. Suggestions welcomed.

Kathy Rogers said...

1. What color food coloring?

2. Why have I never heard of tater crowns or flattened tater tots?

3. Unclear on where/how the english muffin add-in might occur.

Sounds good. In a ghastly sort of way.

D. Sidhe said...

1. Green, obviously. Though I've always felt that lavender and aqua are underused colors in food, even if they do require slightly more effort.

2. Beats me. My grocer has a huge selection of frozen potato products, from assorted fries and roasted chunks to hash browns in both loose and pre-formed portions. Tater crowns are what Ore-Ida calls what are essentially tater tots that are about half as tall and a little bigger in diameter than your standard tater tot. The dorm used to call them "hash browns".

3. Well, you can use any kind of bread, really. But English muffins tend to hold their shape better. Just tear them into bite-sized pieces, and dump them in when you've got some hot oil/grease in the bottom of the thing. Think of it as "lazy French toast".

And it actually is pretty good. It's basically a skillet breakfast, but I like my wok, and I like the reactions houseguests give when they hear I'm making breakfast in the wok I used last night to do Leftover Pizza And Garlic Bread Stir Fry With Garlic Butter Glaze. (Washed, of course.)

julia, how about a cacciatore dish? No pasta, no tomatoes. Or something with zucchini. I also used to have a decent stuffed mushrooms recipe, it had capers and tuna, though I'm sure you can find a lot of variations on the recipe you'd like better. Personally, I just like cooking with capers.

Jeff said...

So does an electric wok really get hot enough to do serious stir fry? When I went from a electric range to a gas one, I really noticed a big difference. I just had to replace my stove and my old (I mean 30+ year old, my oldest piece of kitchen equipment) wok's ring doesn't fit over the grates. I did get a new flat bottomed one, which although the flat bottom that much does work pretty well. I think the new stove, with a 14,000 BTU burner even gets it a little too hot.

D. Sidhe said...

Mine's an Aroma brand, I dunno if there are others. It's got ten heat settings plus a "warm". So it's pretty versatile, and while I had a few coldish meals when I first got it, once I realized I was basically setting it too low, it's been beautiful ever since. I probably could have avoided that had I taken a stab at a few of the recipes actually in the booklet it came with before setting off on my own, but I do enjoy improvising.

It claims to be dishwasher safe, but I'm not convinced. The temperature probe comes out, and the base and pan come apart, and the heat coil is exposed but sealed. But I can't see into the hole the probe fits into, and I don't want it accumulating dishwasher residue or being wet when I use it or anything, so I pretty much just soap-and-wet-sponge-and-rinse the pan between uses and let it air dry overnight. (I have cats. Everything air-dries here, all our towels have fur on them.) The lid doesn't go in the dishwasher either, mostly because it takes up too much space but also because if the handle/vent apparatus flips around it can retain some residue and not get rinsed out, which is gross.

I will caution you, though, that serious stir-fry is not what I do. :-)

mikey said...

Damn, what's the sodium count on that thang? I would eat like three plateloads (yes, that's a metric) of that, but my doc (who speaks Urdu) would kick my ass. Spam/Breakfast sausage is some of my favorite things. And god dammit, we all gotta die of something.

Just thought I'd drop by and say hi...

mikey

D. Sidhe said...

Depending on what potatoes you use, the sodium is pretty much entirely from the meat and cheese you choose. Frozen hash brown potatoes and tater tots and most steak fries tend to come unsalted in the assumption you'll add it yourself. I'm not saying it's good for you, but it's not quite as bad for you as it sounds.

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