Care to have some Morphine with your Eggs?

So for those who don't know, I had a tonsillectomy on Wednesday. Whee! How exciting. (Not. At all. Seriously, this crap hurts.) I am very tired and in a lot of pain and can't eat yummy or exciting foods SO I did quick cooking project the last day I could eat food and decided to save the post for sometime after surgery. Today is that day! Bear with me, as I am still a little fuzzy here.

Scrambled eggs. I think they're probably the first thing most kids learn to cook. They're easy. You can't really mess up a one-ingredient dish. I remember trying to make them by myself at three while everyone in the house slept. Other than the butt-whooping  I got, I did everything fairly correct. Well, that and turning the heat too high. But I digress! The point I am trying to make here is that today, I still love to make breakfast. 

Eggs are one of those foods that when you see them, you think "breakfast."  I do a lot of baking, so for me, I think "cookies," but most people think "breakfast" and stare picturing their favorite kinds of eggs. Sunny side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, boiled or... the omelette.  Omelette's can be simply or complicated, puffy and thick, or thin and silky, filled or have the incredients mixed into the eggs themselves. They can be fried entirely, or baked partially. The kind I tend to make are a thinner, French-style, trifold omelette fried on a griddle and filled. I love to saute onions and tomatoes to toss in, but this morning I went super simple and classic and went for a plain cheese omelette.

Let's start with ingredients. As you can see on the left, not much is required. Good quality eggs, whole milk, half and half, or a splash of whipping cream, butter or margarine, cheese (or whatever filling you want), salt and pepper to taste and a drop of vanilla.
I know the vanilla is going to throw some people off, but trust me, it will NOT make the eggs sweet. There is no sugar in them, so instead its simply a perfume to the dish. One of those things you put in that people taste and say "Hmm. What is that? I can taste something, but I can't tell what it is." Its a tip I learned from one of my big brothers and its truly helped.

Whisk three eggs very well, then mix in your dairy product of choice. Add in the drop or two of vanilla, salt and pepper. Turn your pan onto a medium-low heat and let a pat of butter/margarine melt in the bottom of the pan. Pour the mix into the pan and try to evenly coat the pan. Slowly, it will cook. When most of the liquid-egg is gone, you can add the cheese. This is a slower cooking omelette, but its worth the wait and worth not risking e-Coli.
Lay the fillings you have chosen down the center  in a line, but leave about a half inch to an inch on either end of the line so that your fillings don't ooze or fall out of your omelette.
As a side note, if you choose to put veggies such as mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers or onions in your omelette, this type of omelette needs to have those things cooked before hand, as one the filling goes in there is minimal cook time left.



If you choose to use a cheese filling like me, I left the cheese rest on top of the eggs for about 30 seconds to one minute before I begin to fold my omelette. Then, when ready, I place my spatula under 1/3 of the omelette and flip that 1/3 up and over the filling in the center. Any uncooked egg-liquid will begin cooking from the inside out thanks to the heat from the omelette wrapping up in itself. Next is the hard part, and if you do not have one large or wide spatula, it is completely ok to use two. Lift the middle filled part of the omelette and flip it onto that final third to close the omelette.

Finally, I let it rest there, if I am feeling brave, I might flip it to get a light color on the top, but usually at this point anyone near me is ready to eat and beginning to twitch from having to wait for me to finish, so I slide it off and onto a plate, toss a couple of pieces of toast down with it, and boom! Done. :)

A Baker's Two Dozen.

When I have an order for my little hobby business, I tend to make a little extra for whomever is around. Besides, it gives me a chance to test out new ideas.
This go around, I submitted the option of either one dozen cookies or one pan of brownies to the winner of an auction on my friend Sam's rustic home decor business page. The winner of the auction chose to have a pan of my fudgy-style brownies with walnuts. Since I'd been wanting to try a new method of making my chocolate peanut butter brownies, I broke out two pans and doubled my recipe.

For any baking, I'm a big fan of using real butter if I can, but -especially- for cookies and brownies. Butter does something for these two items that margarine just can't do. Sorry. I will, of course, make any substitutions a patron may ask for, but I prefer they let me do my thing and just trust me that it will be work it. When I start these brownies, I take my room temperature butter and cream it. Then, I mix in vanilla extract and one my secrets, Watkin's Chocolate Extract. Once the extracts and butter are mixed, comes the sugar which also gets creamed in. When you cream in the sugar, FYI, the consistency is going to end up looking like wet sand. Don't worry, once the eggs are in, it gets wet again!

Once the wet mix is ready, in go the dry ingredients. Flour, baking powder and salt, of course, but then comes the cocoa powder. I use two types of cocoa powder. A normal run of the mill unsweetened cocoa, but also a dutch processed cocoa powder. The latter is darker, richer, and adds a depth of chocolaty flavor that you just don't get from the other. :)




The final step, is to bake them. Brownies are finicky. You'd figure with all the mixes they have for brownies that they'd be simple, but truthfully, they aren't. That's one reason why for a long time I didn't sell them (and another reason why I dread it when someone orders them.)  They can come out too dry or too wet soooo easily that sometimes it just isn't worth the hassle. Admittedly, though, they're my favorite to bake. This batch is a walnut batch, but in the picture you'll notice one row of lighter brownies with chips on top. These were my experimental row. They have a layer of PB brownie on top of the fudgy brownie and peanut butter chips on top! Mmm. 
So now I've got my shipment plus a dozen!