End of Month Egg on Toast Extravaganza #5

If you were Mexican-Turkish and hungry, this would make you a good huevos rancheros egg on toast. I have gone a bit liberal on the "toast" part, after Jeanne and anthony suggested last month that any "carbohydrate based foodstuff subjected to the application of heat" would probably do. But it's a real egg.


(Yes, I'm working on the photography, thank you.)

The corn pancake is adapted from a recipe in the Adey Family cookbook "Fresh from the Garden" (now out of print; they used to run the Darling Mills restaurant in Sydney, and grew much of the food they served, so it's a very good book for veggie gardeners). The salsa is an avocado cut into chunks, and dressed with smashed garlic, lime juice and a red chilli. Yes, I had noticed it's just like guacamole, but for some reason it's much nicer in pieces.

The beans are adapted from a Claudia Roden recipe. Roden's "The Book of Jewish Food" is a thing of amazing beauty which anyone interested in their belly should read. Then, like me, you might be inspired by Claudia's references to hunt out the amazing "Life is with people", a fat ethnography of life in the shetl, the Jewish enclaves in Eastern European towns before WW2. I doubt that you will be as lucky as me, and find it on the table at the Lifeline bookfair for $5 five minutes before it closed, but you should buy it anyway. (Yep, fellow Canberrans the bookfair is on again this weekend. Yay!)

For the beans:

Soak 1 cup of kidney beans overnight and then cook them in a jiffy in your pressure cooker, until cooked thoroughly but not mushy. (If you don't have a pressure cooker, you can just ignore them on the stove while you do something else, or get a simmer mat. You could use canned beans, but they just don't taste as good. If you can be bothered cooking Turkish peasant food, you might as well do it properly.) Fry a large sliced onion in olive oil and add 3 cloves of finely chopped garlic when golden. After a moment, add the beans and a can of Italian tomatoes. Add a pinch of sugar to taste and a generous pinch of chili or hot paprika. Or one each of smoked paprika and chili, which is my favourite. Add beans and up to two cups of water. Cover it up and cook slowly the day before you want to have a nice breakfast. In the morning, just warm it add most of a bunch of finely chopped dill.

For the pancakes:

Boil 3 ears of corn, and cut the kernels off. Pop in the food processor with 3 small eggs or 2 large ones and about 3/4 cup flour. The batter looks quite heavy, but you can stir through a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt if you like. Cut the kernels off another ear of corn, and dry roast them in a cast iron frypan until starting to blacken and smoke. Stir into the blended mixture. The batter can rest for a while. Cook pancakes in a hot lightly oiled non-stick pan until brownish. You can make 4 big ones with this much batter, and they are quite thick, not crepe-y or tortilla-y at all. More like toast, in fact. Heh.

Serve warm beans with with a fried egg (start high, turn down to nothing, cover, wait), bacon and avocado on top of a nice warm corn pancake.



This month's egg was brought to you by Stanley, a white leghorn who gets to scratch in the dirt and eat good stuff. (And who craps everywhere, obviously.)

This month's round-up is at the passionate cook