Holla for Challah French Toast

Every wonder why French toast tastes so good in restaurants? The secret is the dense egg bread that they invariably use as a base. Brioche is the fanciest (and the sweetest) bread to use but its hard to cut evenly which is why my candidate for best bread to make into French toast is…challah! That’s right, Friday night’s traditional braided bread is Saturday and Sunday’s dreamy breakfast fodder. Or only Sundays if you are serious about this stuff and not allowed to use the stove on Saturdays.

Challah French Toast

Ingredients:

2 eggs
1/4 cup milk (lactose-free, almond, or coconut — all equally good in this)
1 tablespoon cinnamon
4 good-sized slices of challah or other egg bread
2 tablespoons Earth Balance
Pinch of sea salt

Heat the Earth Balance in a skillet that is big enough for two pieces of toast to fry side-by-side. While you are waiting for the grease to stop foaming, beat the eggs, salt, cinnamon, and milk together in a bowl that is wide enough to submerge your bread in. Dunk one slice at a time, flipping over and ensuring the bread is really soaked.

Drop two soaked slices of bread into the pan before the Earth Balance burns. Brown, flip, and repeat. As I’ve said before, it’s OK to cheat and peek to see if the French toast is ready before turning over. French toast is whole lot more forgiving than pancakes that way.

While the French toast is frying, you can contemplate why it’s so different to write dialogue to be read, versus writing it for people to actually say. Reading your screenplay aloud to yourself can help, but the only true way to tell if the writing is working is to get other people — preferably actors — to read it to each other. Words you might repeat for a reader (or because you like the way they sound) must be omitted for the audience lest the action flag. The texture of a scene comes through in a way it won’t any other way. Apparently, I’m going to be spending more time in LA.

Serve that French toast with grade B maple syrup — from Vermont if you can find it.

The Road to Hollywood is Paved with Burgers…

OK, so maybe it that’s just my road to Hollywood, but there are an awful lot of good burgers to be had in these parts. Since my arrival a week ago, I have eaten at the Counter, Burger Lounge, Rounds and Umami Burger.  The Rounds sandwich pictured here is actually their chicken sandwich (I had to mix it up a bit) and it was fantastic. I’m going to vote for Rounds for best in show because it was the least pretentious and most inexpensive, yet equally fresh and delicious.

Lest you think I’m killing myself with beef, we also had the toasted pecan waffles at the Waffle. That is their famous red velvet waffle which looks pretty hideous to me, but I’m not judging because the toasted pecan waffle was smothered in candied pecans, with additional toasted pecans cooked right in the batter. Real maple syrup costs extra but at least they offer it.

Not far from the Waffle is the Walgreens that looks like this. They make their own sushi. Up to you if you want to trust Walgreens sushi. They have the usual drug store stuff displayed so neatly that the whole place looks like a really nice international duty free store or a European department store that also sells tampons and Doritos with their French perfumes.

Between meals, I realized that writing prose has messed with my ability to write for the screen. D’oh! Or maybe it’s just being away from LA too long. Though the distance probably does wonders for my cholesterol.

Banana Layer Cake to Portland — Script to LA

Heading to LA so it’s time to pull out the tooth-whitening kit and finish my script (yikes!). Both are painful but only the tooth kit will leave lingering sensitivity. I hope.

I don’t hate LA, in fact, I like it. I have great friends there and they have the best French fries on earth, but I will admit that the minute I step off the plane in Burbank (and you still do step off the plane there, and then walk down some metal stairs, and claim your luggage outside like it’s 1956!), my teeth suddenly seem dark brown to me. In addition to massive silicone everything and melted faces, everyone there has the whitest teeth. They glow. Therefore, the serious tooth-whitening kit which comes with the caveat that the goop you are marinating your teeth in can never “come in contact with your gums.” How is that possible?

When I’m stuck on finishing a script (and I always am) it definitely helps to watch good movies. The latest one I viewed was 21 Jump Street with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. Is it art? Perhaps not, but unlike so many other silly TV-show rip-off movies ( A Team, I’m talking to you) this script took the time to create two main characters you actually care about. If you think back on all of the other super broad physical comedies you have watched, you will realize how rare this is. For me, it made all the difference in the world. I laughed at the situations and jokes, but it was the compelling story and characters that made it a fun movie and not just a series of goofy situations. My script has to be 1000 million times better than that because it’s not being written by Jonah Hill. No pressure or anything though…

Cupcake made to sample

One thing I know is that good? My banana layer cake. It was so tasty that I had to bake another one to send all the way to Oregon. I used a reusable cake dome from the Dollar Tree, freezer packs, and a ton of organic packing peanuts. Next time I will use plastic wrap like the lady at You Send Me told me to because the frosting took a walk. I have on good authority that it did remain, however, delicious.

 

Banana Layer Cake with Two Frostings

Printable recipe: Banana Layer Cake with Two Frostings.

Ingredients for cake:

2 cups flour
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup softened Earth Balance
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup mashed bananas in booze (I used two overripe bananas and Triple Sec — booze is optional but nice)
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Ingredients for frostings:

6 cups powdered sugar
8 tablespoons Earth Balance or butter
8 tablespoons liquid (I used lactose-free milk but you can use coconut or almond milk)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons vegan cream cheese substitute
1 cup walnut pieces

When I have old bananas that are too ripe to eat I always mash them in some type of alcohol and leave them overnight. In this case, I used a measuring cup so I could see that the mixture (with Triple Sec) came to one cup of liquified fruit. I put the cinnamon in with the fruit but you could also add it to the flour.

Preheat your oven to 350. Grease and flour two baking rounds. I used 8″ ones but 9″ is a more normal size.

Cream the Earth Balance and sugar in a mixer. Add vanilla. Add the eggs, one at a time. Sift the dry ingredients together and then add them to the wet mixture in three parts, alternating with the bananas and ending with the flour. Beat till smooth but try not to overdue it.

Pour batter into your prepared cake pans evenly and bake for about 30 minutes until they look firm and golden brown and the tops spring back when you push them lightly with your finger. Cool on a rack for at least 5 minutes before attempting to remove from the pans to cool further. If you frost too soon, the frosting will just melt off the cake.

Wash your mixer because you will need it for the frostings. I’m not sure why this cake has two different frostings. I might have run out of something and substituted. That is the usual genesis of my recipes. For instance, the reason there are walnuts all around this cake is that the first time I made it the frosting looked messy and I was hiding it. Walnuts turned out to be the perfect note to balance the whole thing out.

Cream half the powdered sugar and Earth Balance with the faux cream cheese. Add one teaspoon vanilla and just enough liquid to make it frosting consistency. If you are unsure, try some and if it is too hard, add more liquid. Use this frosting for your bottom layer.

Put the top layer on and using the same mixer, add the rest of the ingredients and add liquid till you like the look of it. Frost the top and sides and pat walnuts along the sides with a hard plastic spatula. Can be served immediately but freezes nicely for months.

Photo credit for final photos: Donna Carnegie

Not Your Bubbie’s Matzo Brei

Or more correctly I should say this is not my grandmother’s matzo brei. My grandmother was an extraordinarily versatile woman who by the time she left this earth at almost 100 years old, had been a pretty good painter in oil, an art therapist to children and the elderly, a real estate agent, and a farmer’s wife. One thing she really and truly wasn’t was a good cook. She was famous for mailing us cookies, loosely packed in Fruity Pebbles cereal which begged the question — was she sending us cookie-tasting cereal or cereal-tasting cookies? Both were disgusting.

Your Bubbie, however, would make matzo brei this way, carefully remembering to wring as much moisture as possible from the matzo before frying it. Matzo by itself is pretty tasteless as a food, but as my friend Jackie says, I’d eat my left arm if it were fried sufficiently, and she’s right which is part of the reason I don’t own a Fry Baby or any other device designed for frying. To be clear, Matzo Brei doesn’t involve deep-frying matzo but if there were county fairs in Israel…Well, we can dream.

Matzo Brei

2 sheets of matzo — any kind at all
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons milk (it can be coconut or almond or soy)
4 tablespoons of Earth Balance or butter
1/2 teaspoon of salt

Crumble your sheets of matzo into a sieve and run cold water through them. Let them drain.

Melt the Earth Balance in a big, no-stick frying pan.

In a big bowl, beat the eggs, milk and salt.

Press on the wet matzo until you have manually removed most of the water. Mix the damp matzo shreds into the eggs.

Once the Earth Balance has stopped foaming but before it burns, spoon the matzo glop into the pan. Flatten it with a spatula and wait about 4 minutes until the bottom is golden brown. Flip. Wait another 3 or 4 minutes till fully cooked.

Serve either sweet with maple syrup or jam or savory with yoghurt, sour cream, or similar (my choice). Makes enough brei for two hungry people.

Custard and Coyotes

When I say custard I don’t mean flan or the kind you bake in the oven. I’m talking about the traditional, gluey English kind you “prepare on the hob and pour over puddings (desserts)” to quote something I read about the Bird’s custard online. Bird’s is the instant yellow glop that I remember so well from the lunch room at the girls’ school I went to in London. It has a distinctive, cloying sweet smell which I actually prefer to the taste. Other people love custard though, so I prepared the traditional pourable custard from scratch to serve with some berries I was bringing to a friend’s St. Patrick’s Day meal. Below is an easy, cream-free recipe that I used and everyone seemed to really like it. 

My dislike for custard, however, is nothing to my feelings about coyotes. I lived in Los Angeles for five years, a city that has more urban coyotes than most cities have people. Lying in bed, a few blocks from the theater where they present the Oscars, I could hear the bloodcurdling screams of the coyotes feeding in the dumpster behind my complex. I won’t mention all the pets the coyotes have eaten, except to say that my cat, now an elderly, indoor lounger, was the only cat I have ever heard to hunt alongside and co-exist with coyotes and live to tell about it.

The day after the custard and berries triumph, my tiny hunting dog ran into this coyote while hunting for ground squirrels. That was the fastest I have ever seen my dog run.

Can you blame him?

Printable recipe PDF? Click Pourable Custard Recipe.

Traditional, Pourable Custard
adapted from the Kitchn.com

3 egg yolks (save the whites to make my flourless chocolate cookies)
2 cups full fat milk (I used Lactaid brand but you could use the heavy, canned coconut milk and it would be delicious)
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons good vanilla (most recipes call for a bean but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble)
1 teaspoon cinnamon (my variation)

The reason you can sub coconut milk (or probably any other kind) is that the cornstarch does the thickening work for you. In recipes that call for cream, you don’t need the cornstarch.

Heat your milk in a heavy saucepan on a low to medium until it bubbles around the edges. Remove it from the heat and don’t let it boil. In another bowl, beat all of the other ingredients until the egg yolks look foamy. Slowly drizzle some of the egg mixture into the cooling milk, beating quickly to ensure the eggs don’t cook. Once your eggs are pretty diluted, start going the other way, pouring the milk into the bowl of eggs. Then, transfer all of it back to the saucepan and cook about 10 – 15 minutes until the mixture starts to thicken. Stir constantly, use a low heat, and do not allow it to boil. It’s up to you how thick you want the mixture. I was going for pouring kind so I stopped at about 10 minutes but you could go more like 20 and get a firmer custard.

When you are satisfied that it’s thick enough (some recipes tell you to coat the back of a spoon), pour into small ceramic bowls or a pitcher, depending on how you are serving it, and apply plastic wrap either touching the top to prevent skin forming or not, if you like the skin. Serve immediately over cakes or berries or refrigerate and serve later.

This recipe yielded enough custard for 8 good sized-servings. Make more if you are inviting coyotes.

Photo credits: All photos, except custard being stirred, taken by Jacqueline Simon

Dairy-Free Junk Food Files: Phil’s Potato Tots

I was reading an article about Chez Panisse’s fire because it was a big part of my life growing up, when I spotted an ad on the side of the blog page for a place called Phil’s Sliders. Actually, what I spotted were these square-shaped potato things (see above). What the heck were they? They looked so deliciously unlike any other fried potato-based food I had ever had in my mouth. Were they French fries? Tater tots? Other?

In the interest of fairness, I must mention that there is a very nice Frenchman called Grégoire frying some kick-ass potato puffs just around the corner from Chez. Gregoire is a wonder, cooking gourmet French food at affordable take-out prices in a kitchen the size of a garden shed (with some help from his sous chefs — he has expanded to two restaurants now so it’s no longer just a friendly, garrulous Frenchman frying in a shed). His puffs are amazing, light yet crunchy, savory and addicting. They are probably technically croquettes, a mash of potatoes that has been formed into a ball and flash-fried to crispy perfection. Yet in spite of the fact that I can smell the love usually about twice a day when I am driving by Grégoire (anything he makes with beef isn’t to be missed either), I never stop. The puffs are light going in but feel heavy afterwards. I think they may fry them in duck fat, which I am told is the best fat for frying, but definitely feels cumbersome in the gut.

Phil’s had to be investigated. I swung by downtown Berkeley post-dog hike and was able to park with such ease that fate had to be involved. Indeed, Phil’s potato tots turned out to be the most perfect potato snack I have ever eaten an entire order of while driving home. They are basically squares of hash brown that are fried into manageable bite-sized chunks. Why did no one ever think of this before? Did they? They are so vastly superior to the similar hand-potatoes you can get at the fast food restaurants before 10:30 a.m. that they are not really the same food. I’m sure the fact that McDonald’s and the like freeze theirs before frying is part of the difference. Phil’s tots are fried in canola oil, which explains why I could eat the better part of two orders and not collapse (plus two sliders and an order of their wonderful cole slaw). The rest of the menu is equally simple and perfect — tiny burgers made with succulent Marin Sun Farms grass fed beef or a Portabella mushroom burger, plus specials, that slaw, shakes made with homemade ice cream, homemade sodas and Coke. The day I was there, they were offering a vegan patty option as well.

And speaking of shoehorning a chatty Frenchman into a post about Phil’s, the second act of my script is causing me to introduce more characters. I try not to have more characters than I can pay off and keep things streamlined, having read far too many first-timer scripts that are packed to the gills with people who have no purpose. On the other hand, when the writing process is in full thrust, it’s better not to prune yet. There is plenty of time to cut (or combine) people later if they end up as dead weight. The last thing you want to do when you are in the tender throes of the deadly second act is to curtail your creativity. The excess characters stay — for now. As long as you keep your eye on who the story is really about and keep moving forward, feel free to introduce a man who looks like a giant egg and name him Earl. Or don’t. Because Earl is mine!

I would head for Phil’s right now and do a little potato procrastination, except parking downtown is never easy on a weekday so I won’t become a tots-a-holic and lose what little I have left. Right?

Fun with Farro

I love me some ancient grains, don’t get me wrong, but it can be a pain trying to find good recipes you can rely on. Sunset magazine, for instance, steered me wrong on the amount of liquid to add to farro — which is much less delicious sounding when it’s called spelt. There is some debate as to which type of farro is spelt and which isn’t on Wikipedia and elsewhere, which may explain the lack of clear cooking directions online.

Because our package of farro was from a place called “Casale Bartolini,” I expected John from the Bartolini Family Kitchens blog to basically come over and cook it for me. No relation, sadly, but he did give me this link:

http://food52.com/hotline/15130-how-to-prepare-farro

That discussion is about as close as it gets to specific when you are making farro. The package we had was from Italy, where I guess they just know how to cook farro, because there were no hints whatsoever on the package about how much liquid to add. One blogpost I read was adamant not to soak it overnight but I did rinse it, just in case.

In the end, I decided to cook the farro as if it was risotto and it turned out great. I was using demi-perlato (half pearled) so instructions may vary for un-pearled or fully pearled farro, which might actually be spelt. Or maybe mine was? The translation on the package called it “spelt.”

I spent far too much time on the farro/spelt question this week when I should have been either working on my script or commenting on the writing I received from the other people in my writing group. None of the others are screenwriters but I am writing a family drama and they all have families — and drama — so they’re giving me great notes. I hope I’m holding up my end on their stuff. I no longer believe you can write entirely by yourself, in a vacuum, without the benefit of sharp readers who are also extremely supportive. These people are hard to find. I’m very lucky and I’m bringing cookies to them on Saturday.

Farro Cooked Risotto-Style

1 cup demi-perlato farro (not soaked)
1 cup of white wine
2 cups of chicken broth
4 – 5 cups of chopped fresh vegetables including at least one fresh tomato
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Fresh dill
A large shallot or small onion
Olive oil

Heat your oil in a big skillet. Saute your onion or shallots until soft and then add other veg. Once everything is just starting to reduce, throw in the farro and toast it briefly. The wine goes in next, followed by the broth. Add the fresh dill and lemon juice last.

I stirred the mixture on a low heat for approximately 30 minutes and then let it rest for ten before fluffing. I also added some leftover chicken before serving and a spoonful of plain yoghurt, but you could pretty much serve this dish with anything at all. I have no idea if you are supposed to toast it like risotto or not but I got raves on the taste. I wish I could take this devil-may-care attitude more when writing a script. The results might prove tasty — and less painful in the creation.