Smitten Kitchen's Warm Potato Salad

The sun is setting at 5 PM now, so getting photos of my dinner that look nice is hard!

When I first saw Smitten Kitchen's recipe for potatoes with soft eggs and bacon vinaigrette, I knew I had to make it immediately, as it was a perfect combination of things that I love (potatoes! bacon! vinaigrette! soft eggs! some greens to make it healthy!) I made it for dinner the next night even though I didn't have all of the right ingredients on hand, and it is such a well-written formula that tweaking it to use slightly different ingredients still yields a delicious warm potato salad.

So! I have made this half a dozen times since Deb posted the recipe, and have figured out that I prefer this meal with poached rather than soft-boiled eggs (I find peeling soft eggs without crushing them to be rather difficult, alas), that it works better with greasier bacon so that there is sufficient bacon grease for the vinaigrette, that it is just fine without blue cheese, and that boxed salad greens work very well when your local grocery doesn't stock frisee.

Though I tend to make a couple ingredient changes from the original, I am just posting this as a recommended recipe, rather than posting a recipe here, because Deb's recipes are always so beautifully done and well-tested. You should make this, it is delicious and gluten-free, and by skipping the cheese it is dairy-free too!

Coconut Macaroons

I had a bag of unsweetened coconut lurking in the back of my cupboard, and in the spirit of trying to use up ingredients but also wanting something really simple to bake because I cannot deal with recipes that use up dozens of dishes these days, I made some macaroons. I was surprised by how much I liked them; they are slightly crisp on the outside and pleasantly chewy inside.

Macaroons: very simple to make, and gluten-free/dairy-free without adaptation.

Macaroons (with unsweetened coconut)

Adapted from this recipe

As always, if you need to be gluten-free, make sure to check your ingredient labels before baking.

3 egg whites

2 cups finely shredded unsweetened coconut

½ cup plus 1 TBS granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

¼ tsp sea salt (optional)

Yields about 12 cookies.

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Mix all the ingredients together, until all the coconut is incorporated and the dough is slightly sticky (you may need to use a little more or less coconut depending on how big your egg whites are).

Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper (or use a lot of cooking spray instead of the paper, but I like parchment paper because it makes clean up really easy). Using your hands or a spoon, form the dough into walnut-sized balls and place on the baking sheet. Flatten them slightly.

Bake at 350 F for 16-20 minutes, until the macaroons are slightly brown (I live at 7000+ feet, you may need to adjust your cooking time. 18 minutes was perfect for these cookies at my altitude).

 Mixing all the ingredients together.

It will take a few minutes of stirring, but eventually all the ingredients will come together to form a dough. 

Unbaked macaroons. 

Baked macaroons! You can see that I had a small ring of caramelized sugar/egg white around the macaroons. I think this could be prevented by adding a little more coconut and/or by putting the cookies on the middle over rack; I forgot to rearrange my oven racks and used the bottom one.

A Gluten-Free Twist on Eggs Benedict

One thing I miss quite a bit since going gluten-free is Eggs Benedict. It is a delicious dish, but in my mind it is dependent on having a perfect English muffin. I have not found a DF/GF English muffin yet that works for me, and I haven't gotten around to making my own yet. I am still working on a bread replacement that tastes like real bread (my recipe on this site is tasty enough, and good for putting sandwich fillings on, but the texture is all wrong when I crave real bread) after all. So I decided to put together a deconstructed Eggs Benedict since I had Canadian bacon in the fridge. Then I thought I'd add salsa and avocado. I needed some carbohydrate to hold it all together, so I made brown rice.

The result was more of a Southwestern-inspired meal, and is nothing like Eggs Benedict aside from the egg and canadian bacon, but it was good.

To make your own, first start cooking some brown rice. When it is done, fry a slice or two of canadian bacon. Meanwhile, spoon some rice onto a plate. When the bacon is done, place it on top of the rice. Fry or poach an egg until it is soft in the middle. Or until runny, if that is what you prefer. Slide the egg onto the bacon, and spoon salsa over the whole thing. Add avocado slices if desired. Hollendaise sauce would be awesome, but I didn't want to get that many dishes dirty. Put some salad greens on your plate if you are trying to eat better.

Result: tasty, and naturally gluten and dairy free.

Quinoa Tabouli

Here is a dish which can be the main part of a meal or a side dish, and it is friendly to most of the special diets. It is gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, vegan, can be made nut-free by skipping the garnish, and it has lots of vegetables. Basically, it is awesome. And good for you.

Quinoa Tabouli 

Adapted from this recipe

1 cup quinoa

2 cups water or broth

1/2 of a yellow onion, diced

1-2 cloves garlic, minced

1 stalk of celery, diced

1 half of a cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped

1/4 cup lemon juice

3 Tbs olive oil

1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning

1 1/2 tsp dried oregano or basil

salt and pepper to taste

chopped almonds to garnish, if desired

Rinse the quinoa in a sieve for a minute. This gets rid of the bitter taste from the quinoa. Put the quinoa and water or broth in a pan, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until the quinoa is done, about twenty minutes. 

Meanwhile, chop and peel vegetables as required. If you do not like the flavor of raw onion, sautee it in olive oil over medium heat for ~5 minutes, I did. 

When the quinoa is done, mix in the vegetables, oil, lemon juice and spices. Garnish with nuts if you so desire.

Serves four.

If I'd had fresh mint or basil and tomatoes I totally would have added them! It is good warm or cold. 

Farm vs. factory farm eggs

I tend to be suspicious of claims about food. For instance, I understand that high-fructose corn syrup is not a good thing to be pumping our bodies full of, but I am skeptical of drinks and snacks that claim "no HFCS! Real Sugar!" like that in and of itself is a health claim. If it has 45 grams of sugar, HFCS or cane sugar, it still isn't good for you. I am also a bit dubious about if organic food actually has more nutrients like some sources say. I figured the benefit was more that it didn't have pesticides.

I was also pretty suspicious about eggs. That is, people say that eggs not grown on a factory farm have much yellower yolks. I was like "pff, I think they are exaggerating."

Nope, that particular claim is true, it turns out.

Factory farm eggs on the left, eggs from my aunt's chickens on the right.

I would say they are noticeable different colors...

Actually there is some science behind this. To paraphrase what I learned in developmental biology, chickens make "white" (I think it is actually pale yellow) and orange yolk. They make layers of the white yolk while it is day time, or while it is light out. They make layers of the orange yolk at night, when it is dark. Because factory-farmed chickens live in buildings with perpetual artificial day, very little of the orange is made.

Is it weird that I think about developmental biology almost every time I crack open an egg? Probably.

The real reason why I try to get eggs from farms is because I am trying to be ethically and environmentally responsible, but the farm eggs are quite pretty.