Texas wildfire salad.

Texas wildfire salad. Arugula and seared zucchini with habanero herb dressing. © Ryan Schierling

We've been running a bit of a hot spell here in Central Texas, and the pepper plants are about the only thing in our garden that are tolerating the heat. Our patch consists mainly of jalapeños and habaneros this year. The jalapeños we use with frequency, but the habaneros are a little tricky because we either need a fresh harvest large enough to make hot sauce, or we have to find ways to use what ripens in a steady trickle. If you're familiar with habaneros, you know that this little orange pepper packs a wallop of heat. While it may not rank at the top of the Scoville scale, it is up there high enough to warrant wearing gloves when cutting them and taking measures to avoid any juices that may aerosolize in the chopping process.

So, I decided to make a habanero salad dressing out of a couple of them. Of course, right? For continuity of color, I chose to include orange bell pepper – well, in addition to the fact that there is nothing meaty about habanero peppers and I wanted to add some substance and body. There is a reason for the popularity of habaneros and it's not all about its spicy reputation. Habs have a wonderfully distinct, almost fruity, flavor that transcends the heat. With the addition of garlic and some fresh Texas tarragon (Mexican mint marigold) leaves from our garden, the resulting dressing is creamy in texture without being heavy and has a boldness that is both tangy and mildly herbacious.

Cornbread Florentine Benny

Cornbread Florentine with sour cream hollandiase. © Ryan Schierling

One of my favorite breakfasts is Eggs Florentine with hash browns. I developed this strong affection when we were in Seattle and lived walking distance from The Shanty Cafe, whose straight-forward Florentine Benny and hash browns were delicious comfort on many a chilly Northwest morning. I'll resist making this a diatribe about the rarity of finding really good, crispy, diner-style shredded hash browns in this town (no, really, it's invariably "home fries" in these parts), because today I'm all about sharing another way to enjoy runny eggs and spinach greens.

There's something all sparkly-sawdust about living in Austin that causes us to eventually give all of our favorite dishes a Texas twist. In this instance, a not-too-sweet cornbread finds its place in lieu of the traditional English muffin, and the hollandaise is modified to include a touch of lime and sour cream.

The cornbread recipe is my adaptation of “Yankee Corn Bread” from Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads, but using a hot cast iron skillet method for baking. I omitted the bacon, of course. I also added some masa harina (a type of corn flour used for making tortillas and tamales) – because if you know me well, you know that I am loath to bake anything containing corn that doesn't include a bit of masa harina for the delicious flavor it imparts. Hell, I even put it in my pizza dough. Ahem... I've also reduced the amount of sugar considerably, because I don't need or want a sweet cornbread for this preparation, and the addition of frozen corn kernels naturally adds a bit of sweetness. And – to digress for the second time in this paragraph – this cornbread is also pretty awesome to use for making stuffing/dressing during the holidays.

We like the Cornbread Florentine with my Southwest Sour Cream Hollandaise because, well, how can you not offer up a bit of the rich yolky goodness that makes poached eggs happy the world around. This is essentially a blender hollandaise with lime juice in lieu of some of the lemon and sour cream in place of some of the butter. It's a little "softer" than the traditional variety and compliments the cornbread. Ryan generally doesn't dig regular hollandaise sauce, but this one he finds delightful. Go figure. That said, if busting out the blender seems like too much of an stretch on a given morning, I won't hesitate for a second to just use plain ol' sour cream and a good hot sauce drift. I assure you it is really quite good both ways.

We typically make this with cornbread that was baked the night before, so it makes for a relatively quick and easy breakfast. 

Give quiche a chance.

Quiche with spinach and feta. © Ryan Schierling

We crave what we crave, and oh, how I have missed my favorite spinach and feta quiche.

Believe it or not, back in the day this was one of my preferred quick, late-morning meals with a nice hot latte. There was a delightful neighborhood coffee shop that sold this delicious pie by the slice. It was a thick, custardy piece with the bright tang of feta and a generous amount of chopped spinach perfectly suspended throughout. It was just the right thing to get me through a busy afternoon on those days when I needed a little bit of protein, instead of something starchy or sweet.

It's no easy thing to find a quiche that is truly a custard; delicate and flavorful without being heavy and essentially a baked-egg casserole, as they are so often prepared. Many also suffer from the addition of abundant oily cheese, or vacuous vegetables that are neither enhanced by or serve to elevate such creamy custard. Some "quiches" are unabashedly filling-centric, where the "custard" is reduced in proportion to merely an egg-based binder instead of shining as the real star. 

It took a bit of research to find a recipe offering guidelines for the right proportions of egg and cream and milk to meet my criteria. But, fortunately for my cravings, this quiche base magnificently hits the mark. While it may seem that anything containing eggs and milk baked inside a pie shell qualifies as a quiche in the wide world of recipes online, we all know that the French are a little more particular about these things. Fact is, I almost feel bad that my favorite variety is so very Florentine. Or maybe even Greek – with the feta included, it's a little like spanakopita meets classic French cuisine – but, in the best possible way.

Pattypan Parmesan

(L) Pattypan squash. (R) Pattypan Parmesan. © Ryan Schierling

Pretty and petite, pattypan squash is a rare gem to find in the grocery store – which is a tragic testament to the SKU-driven times we live in. Not only are they adorable, with their flying-saucer shape and scalloped edges, they are mild and delicious to eat.

As a kid, we had these pale green lovelies in our big garden every year along with the yellow crookneck and zucchini. While squash wasn't my favorite vegetable, the pattypan was my first choice whenever squash was served plain. They can be enjoyed small (bite-sized is what you might find in stores) or as big as six inches in diameter, depending upon how you plan to prepare them. Pattypan squash also comes in varieties ranging from yellow and dark green to white, but it's the pale green ones that bring back the memories of searching for them, so-well camouflaged under the big green leaves.

It was a visit to an Austin farmer's market to that reignited my passion for pattypans. A few years ago in bee-line route to get a dozen fresh "yard eggs" before they were sold out, I passed a vendor with a bounty of pattypan and had to stop. This is why everyone should go to the farmer's market on occasion – such delightful finds! 

Popeye vs. Jack Lalanne.

Green and yellow, green and yellow - pineapple spinach agua fresca. © Ryan Schierling

I'll be honest with you. There's a hippie vegetarian joint in Austin that we have just recently, after two years of living here, begun infrequently frequenting. It took a chilaquiles recommendation from a friend to get us in the door. The surprise of the meal (yes, the chilaquiles were solid) was a rich, deep green, pineapple spinach agua fresca bubbling in a Lexan fountain of youth, that seemed to have superlative curative and monstrous restorative properties. We've been back on mornings where the night prior had us tying one on and dragging it around. 

The only problem is, they're closed on Sunday. And Sunday morning comes after Saturday night. 

So, we had some things to figure out. Pineapples, spinach, how hard could it be? Actually, not that hard at all. The wonderful thing about agua fresca is that it lets the fruit shine without much embellishment or added sugar, and it is an incredibly refreshing drink without being cloyingly Kool-Aid sweet. Fresh pineapple is amazing when juiced, and a little fresh spinach adds color and some vitamin C, calcium and fiber, folic acid, magnesium and lutein. 

Ahem. I'll be honest with you, again. I have historically had a problem with green beverages. I have barfed up wheatgrass juice and I'd rather drink compost tea than anything with spirulina in it. Sorry, healthy smoothie enthusiasts, unless I'm pouring an oatmeal stout into a blender with some ice cream, chocolate chip cookies and a shot of espresso, I don't want to have to chew what I'm drinking. But this green dynamo? All bets are off. 

Now, I imagine this restaurant has an industrial juicer that would put the trash compactor on the Death Star to shame. And if you happen to have a bad-ass, solar-powered, brushed stainless steel and polished chrome juicer autographed by Jack Lalanne, well then, good for you. We used a blender for this recipe and strained out most of the solids with a sieve – which is my least favorite thing in all of cooking, ever… pushing solids through a sieve… I sincerely, seriously hate it. But I love this juice.

Double dipping.

Feta and spinach dip... it's what Wheat Thins® crave. © Ryan Schierling

A great many of you hold a special place in your heart (and stomach) for our three-ingredient, 24-hour caramelized onion dip. It was the second-most popular Foie Gras Hot Dog read of 2011 and "Chips, dips and dorks" is still one of my favorite posts ever (though I have formally apologized to Starkey for calling his eating pony-sized horseshoes at D'Arcy's Pint half-assed).

It was exactly this time last year we unleashed that dip, just in time for the big football match. Event? Football game? Game. (Hockey fan, forgive me.)

There aren't too many other dip recipes in circulation in our household. Of course, we do make queso, because if you live in Texas and don't make queso, you run the risk of being branded a communist and the state will come and take your babies away. But that's a recipe for another day, and this is one of our new faves.

Frustrated with countless bad versions of spinach-artichoke hot-mess, I started at zero and made things up as I went along. Now, there is no cream cheese, no artichokes, no gooey, bubbling lava that congeals into a lumpy, grey cheese brick after 10 minutes out of the oven. This is a simple, delicious and easy-to-make recipe with – like our onion dip – only three ingredients. Unlike our onion dip, it only takes about 15 minutes. And, you know what? It's pretty, too.


Feta and spinach dip

1 10 ounce package frozen chopped spinach, cooked, with all liquid squeezed out
16 ounces sour cream
12 ounces of the best fresh feta cheese in brine you can find – this will not work with that dry, pre-crumbled crap you buy in plastic tubs at the grocer (we use Bulgarian sheep feta from Phoenecia here in Austin)
1 tablespoon crushed red pepper flakes

In a small covered saucepan over medium-low heat, cook the frozen spinach in a bit of water until done. Drain the spinach in a colander and squeeze out all remaining liquid. Put the spinach into a food processor, add the sour cream and crumble in the feta cheese. Add a tablespoon of crushed red pepper flakes and whiz until well mixed. Serve with a sprinkle of crushed red pepper flakes on top and a side of Wheat Thins. (I chose Wheat Thins® because the slight sweetness of the cracker works ridiculously well with the rich, tangy and salty flavors of the dip. If you want veg, carrot sticks work really well.)

Oh, and Superbowl something, something. Superbowl. Whatever. 

Fancy pants humble pie.

Galette with carrots, potatoes and spinach. © Ryan Schierling

This one time, I got an idea for a recipe... Yeah, sometimes talking about it feels a little less exciting after you've had a couple days of space from the process. But when you are in the midst of innovation, immersed in an idea and its possible variants and unable to shut off the running dialogue as you craft your dish, every little choice is a small thrill on top of the rush of simply making something new.

So, what's the story? I was possessed by the desire to make something kinda post-holidays thrifty, beautiful, vegetarian and main-dish worthy. Those poor veggies; they really do get short shrift sometimes when it comes to prime time on the plate. A true "entree" featuring vegetables is a tricky one to pull off without resorting to some form of a casserole. One elegant attempt that comes to mind all too clearly was a mixed vegetable pave I was once served for dinner on a wine train excursion. It was over a decade ago, but I remember it well because as lovely an idea as it was, it tasted terrible. I'm not sure exactly what was in it, but there were suspicions that it included some poorly-seasoned okra. The idea, however, was interesting to me.

Last year Ryan pulled out the mandolin and made a wonderful potato pave. I loved the structure of the layered potatoes, but I was thinking of something a little more rustic that incorporated more colorful vegetables – carrots and spinach – and that wasn't quite so time intensive.

Elements. © Ryan Schierling

The recipe below will flush out the technical details, but I want to note a few things that were important to me in the making of this galette. I could have used any kind of dough, but I wanted it to be distinctly savory, so I made it with 1/4 dark rye flour. It was actually the rye flour that inspired the cream cheese on top. (That and the fact that we had a copious quantity of it still in the fridge left over from the holidays.) Cream cheese and rye are a brilliant flavor combination. The tang of cream cheese also turns out to be a nice complement to the sweetness of the vegetables, and we found ourselves realizing more, not less, was the way to go.

The quality of the carrots makes a huge difference in a dish like this, so the best organic specimens you can find will be well worth it.

I've made this twice, now. The first time I used a recipe from our 1961 copy of Gourmet's Basic French Cookbook as a guide on the pie dough recipe.The second time I was considering using a pastry recipe intended for galettes that includes eggs, but I was so happy with how the first one turned out, I stuck with it. (One of these days I'll try it that way, though.) This is a relatively tall galette, however, and when you fold pastry dough full of butter like this over those high edges, it has a tendency to melt and slide down the sides a little before firming up. The second time I made it I wanted to go even taller, so I used the ring portion of a spring-form pan to support the sides through the first half of baking time. It was a little tricky, but worked out pretty nicely in the end to allow for a tall, if not a little more uniform around the edges, rustic pie.

Yeah, there are a couple of "fancy gadgets" I put to good use... But we're thrifty – both our food processor and mandolin were used finds we paid a fraction to acquire. The ingredients are downright elemental. This will easily serve 6-8 and shouldn't set you back more than about ten bucks.

Tasty hot or cold, I hope you enjoy this as much as we do.

Redemption.

(L) Layer one. (R) Fresh out of the oven. © Ryan Schierling

It's been eight years since I made a lasagna.

There's a reason for that. In 2003, I spent the better part of a day making a vegetarian lasagna for my then-girlfriend. This wasn't just a thrown-together, slap-dash hot dish. Each layer was a work of art, and I had poured my heart into it. I put it into the oven, tipped myself a drink and smiled a little, nodding my head proudly. This was going to be the best lasagna I'd ever crafted.

When the kitchen timer on the oven buzzed zero, I had pot-holders at the ready. I opened the oven door and paused for a moment with my eyes closed, breathing in deeply to savor the comforting, rich, straight-up-nonna's-kitchen aroma that had filled the room. I pulled the oven rack toward me with my left hand, only to watch in horrific slow motion as the rack tipped and the 9x14" glass pan full of all that was good in the world suddenly lurched forward. The leading pan handle hit the end of the oven door right at the window and – as if carefully scripted in a near-physics-defying move – the entire pan flipped over and shattered, upside down on the tile floor.

I let out a blood-curdling "NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"* and slammed the oven door so hard it came off the hinges. Birds took flight from nearby telephone wires. Neighbors with open windows feared the worst. My face turned blood red, I dropped to my knees and with clenched fists thrust skyward, I cursed the heavens furiously in Italian.

I don't know Italian.

Eight years is long enough to forget a lot of things, apparently.

Florentine Benny.

Breakfast BFF. © Julie Munroe

I've tried not to make quest out of it... you know, I'm keeping my expectations low. A year ago we could walk down to The Shanty Cafe in Seattle on any given weekend morning and I could count on getting the most reliably comforting Florentine Benedict every single time. Even better that it was served up with absolutely no fuss, perfectly crisp hash browns and a good cup of coffee. It was my "usual" and, of course, I would be thrilled to find a place around here that served something comparable at an equally casual establishment.

It's not something you expect to find on any old breakfast menu, though. Not these days - not anywhere I know about, at least. Besides, embracing the cuisine in these parts means more often expecting to see migas or chilaquiles on the menu. So, while Ryan indulges in his quest to try every chicken-fried steak in Central Texas, I've really just been hoping to find my "new usual" somewhere along the way. 

Then it happened... and, oh, holy hollandaise... it appears on the special brunch menu at Magnolia Cafe right here in Austin. Perfectly steamed spinach, poached eggs with yolks of liquid gold, and a hollandaise sauce that is rich and sour-creamy but not overpowering. As much as I love hash browns, their delicious red potato home fries didn't give me much opportunity to miss them. The pineapple and strawberries were the perfect palate cleansing finish. 

This isn't the first breakfast that has stolen my heart at Magnolia, but it may have very well sealed the deal as my new usual.