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Sometimes all it takes to reinvigorate an old standard is to slightly alter the standard ingredients it’s usually made with. Using pecorino instead of parmesan cheese, for example, will yield a shaper, saltier, nuttier flavor. Adding olives to a tomato sauce adds a depth and sourness to the sauce that, for me, marries well with the sweetness of the tomatoes. Using goat cheese instead of mayonnaise or mustard on a sandwich instantly elevates what is (for me) usually a dull, last-resort meal.
For French toast, a simple bread substitution can make a huge difference. I grew up using the standard, plastic-bag Wonder bread for French toast. As I got older, I started making French toast with a wheat bread made at my local grocery store. Most recently, I served a batch of French toast made with sweet, eggy challah to a group of friends, wanting to replicate the challah French toast served with orange-cranberry butter on a cool November New York morning several years ago.
My French toast, though made with the same bread, was nothing so fancy. It was served on the coffee table as my friends sat on the floor, coaxing the cats to come out and play. (The mean one couldn’t get enough, and the sweet one was too shy.) The bacon burned, because my boyfriend left me in charge of it without telling me, since I was over the stove anyway and despite the fact that I prefer my bacon burned and he, you know, doesn’t. My 4-cup coffee maker only actually makes about 2.5 human-sized cups, so this group of five kept refilling the basket with fresh grounds and running the machine again. The syrup, warmed on the stove, was served out of a plastic measuring cup (being the only thing with a spout and thus the only thing with a reasonable shot at not getting syrup all over the white carpet) (not that spilling on the carpet matters to me, as I spill coffee on it once a week, and am still not old enough for carpet).
The French toast I made with humble Wonder bread on Saturday mornings with my stepfather is not elevated by fancier bread, though it was tender and sweeter. I wonder how much the richer, eggier, sweeter, more sophisticated taste of the soaked fried bread came from the fact that I was making it for others. For someone who loves to cook, I entertain rarely. When I do, I prefer to serve chips and salsa while Handsome mans the grill. Standing in my kitchen, with friends all around me, I felt vulnerable and appreciated all at once. In a room full of people who love me, I was happy I’d served my stepdad’s French toast with challah, but knew I could have served it with Wonder bread and they would have reacted the same way.
Challah French Toast
A riff on my own French toast
Serves 5
Note: I do not measure when I make French toast. My stepdad never did, either. All measurements are approximate and should be customized to suit your own taste, and to better impress your friends (who don’t need impressing).
You will need:
1 loaf of challah bread, or other eggy bread, sliced
7-9 eggs, depending on how absorbent your bread is
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
Butter, for the skillet
Heat skillet on medium-high heat, and melt butter. (It’s perfectly acceptable if the butter browns.)
Meanwhile, whisk eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Soak one slice of bread at a time on both sides, and put the egg-soaked bread in the hot buttered skillet. Cook about three minutes on one side, or until golden brown, then flip and repeat on other side.
Serve immediately with warmed syrup, or keep warm in the oven until the bacon is finished burning.
Photo by Grongar, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
I haven’t had the baking bug in quite awhile. I could bore you with all of my reasons and excuses, but instead, I’ll bribe you with chocolate!
The making of these tiny pots of chocolate cream was precipitated by my waking up with a sudden determination to bake something, but this elusive “something” needed to meet several criteria.
The baked good needed to be something that Handsome and I could consume in a short amount of time, with a relatively low level of calorie-guilt. It needed to be something simple– no recipes calling for chilling overnight, or blanching the almonds before toasting, peeling, and re-toasting them, all in the service of eventually candying them as a garnish. I needed something simple, straightforward, and with a tad of elegance.
Enter my mother’s Betty Crocker Cookbook. Amid the recipes for Cherries Jubilee and Grasshopper Brownies was sandwiched a recipe for pot de crème. (Spoiler alert: this is not that recipe.) Flipping through this cookbook was enlightening; Betty takes a lot of shortcuts compared with the all-organic, gluten-free, free-range, Atkins-friendly bloggers of today (all of whom I love dearly and worship faithfully, btw). Betty is all about the pudding packet and the canned pie filling. As I giggled at the subversiveness of using shortening in a pie crust and canned pears for a special company-quality dessert, I remembered a recent post from The Kitchn about using a packet of Jell-O to flavor frosting. The cake they use to demonstrate this technique is every eight-year-old girl’s fantasy. The final product is covered in sprinkles, candles, candies, and glitter.
My pot de crème is not that. But the recipe comes from the fine bloggers at The Kitchn, who lately have won my heart and are my new favorites. Their recipe is simple, easy to follow, and has five ingredients. A quick Google search also informed me that I didn’t need fancy ramekins to make pot de crème; I wound up using four white ramekins and two small IKEA juice glasses. My eggs are free range, but my chocolate sure ain’t Scharffen Berger. And my heavy cream is definitely the store brand. This fancy, intimidating, French-so-it-must-be-impossible recipe came together in about ten minutes with so little effort, it may as well have been the pudding packet.
*Note: I have no photos for this post, because I ate all six little pots of goodness before I could photograph them in daylight. You’ll just have to imagine how beautiful they were.
Chocolate Whiskey Pots de Crème
Adapted from The Kitchn
Makes 6 servings
You will need:
2 c. heavy cream
5 oz. dark or bittersweet chocolate
1/4 c. honey
4 egg yolks
3 tbsp. whiskey (don’t use a smoky variety)
Preheat the oven to 300, and bring 4 cups of water to a simmer in a small pot. Set out six ramekins in a 13×9 cake pan.
Bring the heavy cream to a simmer over medium heat.
Meanwhile, chop the chocolate into tiny pieces. (Note: 5 ounces of chocolate is a weird amount, as bars are 4 ounces. I used one bar and added about a tablespoon of chocolate chips I had on hand. It was fine.)
Combine the eggs, honey, and whiskey in another bowl and whisk about two minutes, or until it starts to thicken.
When the cream starts to simmer, remove it from the heat and stir in the chocolate. Whisk until chocolate is completely melted.
Add the chocolate mixture to the egg mixture slowly, whisking constantly to bring the eggs up to the temperature of the chocolate without cooking them. Once the mixture is fully combined, divide among six ramekins (or juice glasses, or small jelly jars, or pretty coffee mugs). Pour the water into the baking pan until it comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Bake 30-40 minutes, and remove from oven while center still jiggles a little.
Cool at room temperature at least one hour before serving. Store in fridge up to four days.
*Note: when I let them cool for an hour, the texture was very loose, like pudding. (Not that anyone minded.) I chilled the others overnight, and the texture set properly for a much firmer dessert. Do what makes you happy. They taste delicious right out of the fridge, though!
Handsome and I are fans of lazy weekend mornings. Frequently Saturday mornings aren’t as lazy as we want them to be.; we have errands to run, martial arts classes to attend, other details of our lives that need attention. Sundays, though, are for laziness.
The particular Sunday on which this breakfast was made was particular lazy. We slept until eleven, starting talking about breakfast at noon, and eventually ate breakfast close to three. (Part of this delay was due to the huge line at the grocery store when Handsome ran out for milk on Super Bowl Sunday.) We discussed the usual bacon, eggs, and toast breakfast, when suddenly I had a craving for French toast.
French toast is one of the first “from scratch” meals I learned to make myself. My stepdad used to make French toast with regular Wonderbread and he taught me how to beat the eggs, mix in the milk, dunk the bread long enough so that it soaks up the egg mixture, prep the skillet with butter, not get the heat too high, and the proper way of cutting it into triangles. Some of my best grade-school memories are helping my stepdad in the kitchen when he made French toast. I felt capable, helpful, and close to him.
Breakfast was always my stepdad’s meal. I was an impossibly picky eater, but he could fry eggs, whip up pancakes, or enlist my help in making French toast and I was happy to eat whatever he put in front of me. Part of the reason for that may have been that I got to help; thinking back over my experiences with food in my childhood, the meals I liked best were the ones I got the help make. I always got to help make French toast. I think that breakfast was the most successful meal for my sister, too.
When I got older and had a job that required me to be at work early on Saturday mornings, French toast with my stepdad stopped being our tradition. I am sure he still made it, and I’m not sure he ever thought of it as a tradition he had with me, but there weren’t very many opportunities once I was a teenager for us to make breakfast together. But I still think of him every time I get the urge to make French toast.
This is essential his French toast recipe, and probably resembles a host of other recipes available. I’ve never looked one up, and I don’t know the exact measurements of any of the ingredients. This recipe is about procedure and trusting the procedure to yield the desired result.
You will need:
Several pieces of soft bread (I used a grainy variety, which yielded a nice nutty undertone)
1-2 tbsp butter
2 eggs (one egg per person)
Several splashes of milk
About a quarter cup of granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
A couple shakes of cinnamon
Heat a skillet over medium/ medium-high heat.
Whisk together eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon.
Dunk pieces of bread into the mixture, and turn the bread until completely coated in the egg mixture. Leave the bread a few seconds so the egg mixture really gets into the bread.
Melt the butter in the skillet. When the butter is melted and the skillet is hot, place the egg-soaked bread into the skillet. Repeat for other pieces of bread until the pan is full.
Cook several minutes on each side. I tend to err on the side of a cooler skillet, closer to medium, so it takes about five minutes per side. When the bottom side is spotty brown, flip the bread. When all pieces are done, cut them into triangles using the sharp edge of the spatula.
Serve with powdered sugar or maple syrup, or…
Adapt this recipe from 17 and Baking for a berry syrup!
For the berry syrup, my way, you will need:
About 1 cup frozen raspberries or other frozen berries
1/4 to 1/2 cup maple syrup
Rinse the frozen bits off the berries. Warm the berries over medium heat in a saucepan or skillet. Use a spatula or spoon to smush (yes, that is the technical term) the berries as they warm and the heat breaks them down.
When the berries are hot, and just before your French toast is finished, pour the maple syrup into the berry mixture and mix well.
Top French toast with berry syrup and enjoy!
(I found that the berries I used overwhelmed the maple flavor, so I think it might be interesting to either use equal parts syrup and cooked berries, or to warm some maple syrup and stir in a few tablespoons of your favorite jam. Something to experiment with.)
