No-Slip Breakfast Burrito

In an effort to mix it up somewhat, I though I'd share a recipe that I (sort of) made up myself! It's called, as you may have guessed, the no-slip breakfast burrito :)

I'm a big breakfast fan, and when I say that, I don't mean that I'm a big fan, I mean that I am a fan specifically of big breakfasts. I would much rather start off my morning with something hearty and savory like eggs and bacon or biscuits and gravy, then something small and sweet like a cinnamon roll or a simple bowl of sugary cereal. That all being said,  I don't usually have much time in the mornings before school or work to take the time to cook myself all the things I would really like to eat. With this in mind, and after some inspiration from my roommate, I have recently resorted to the breakfast burrito.

Source: National Cancer Institute Author: Renee Comet (photographer) AV Number: AV-9400-4222 Date Created: 1994

What's great about the breakfast burrito is that you can pack a lot of different ingredients into one easy-to-take-with-you tortilla. Here are just a few of the combinations I've tried:

• turkey, egg, and cheddar cheese--for a classic meat and cheese breakfast feel
• tomatoes, green peppers, onion, egg, and provolone cheese--for the veggie-lover 
• turkey, tomatoes, egg, and Monterey Jack cheese-- for a sort of combo of the first two
• tomatoes, spinach, egg, and mozzerella cheese--because it's just another good veggie and cheese one

By Nillerdk (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-3.0

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

And I usually add a little salt and pepper to taste. Of course, there are many more combinations I've dreamed of trying--like mushrooms, leftover ground beef, egg, and Swiss cheese because I love mushroom and Swiss burgers!-- but these are just the simple ones I've been able to put together with whatever I happened to have in the fridge at a given time. 

But before I could master all these different flavor options, I had to master the art of keeping the burrito together. If you're anything like me, you've noticed the complicated origami that must take place to make sure the burrito filling stays packed inside the tortilla. This turned out to be simple enough to figure out after a few tries, but it was not until my roommate revealed her no-slip secret that I was able to keep the insides of my burrito from tipping out of the open end. 

So without further ado, here's how it's done:

No-Slip Breakfast Burrito

Ingredients:

You can use pretty much whatever you want, but to start with something easy, let's just say..

• a slice or two of a roma tomato, diced
• a slice or two of deli turkey, torn into several smallish chunks (chunk size is really up to you)
• 1/4 cup (more or less as desired) of shredded Monterey Jack cheese
• 2 eggs
• a splash of milk
• salt and pepper to taste
• one medium-sized flour tortilla
• one extra pinch or two of Monterey Jack cheese, if desired

1. Start by whisking the eggs and milk together in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Don't be shy, break up those yolks. 

2. Once the egg mixture is fully whisked, throw everything else into the bowl. Trust me. Stir it all around until everything is well-coated in egg. 

3. On the stove, bring a burner to medium or medium-low heat depending on how sensitive your stove top is. Put a decent-sized skillet on the burner and don't be stingy with the cooking spray. 

4. Once the skillet is hot, pour the contents of the mixing bowl into your skillet and wait for the bottom to set (it doesn't take long!). When the bottom has set, you can try to flip it over. Or, you can play it a little safer, and carefully push the outside edges towards the center with your spatula, allowing the liquid egg to flow out to the edge of your skillet and cook. It might be a little difficult with the chucks of tomato and turkey, but you'll get to flip it a few times once there is no uncooked egg left. 

5. When it's nice and firm, slide the egg off the skillet and onto a plate and set aside. Take your tortilla and warm it up a little in the skillet (not for too long though). If you like, add your extra few pinches of cheese to the top of the tortilla and let it melt a little for some added gooey goodness. 

6. Plate the cheesy tortilla and lay your omelette on top. Take one edge of the tortilla and egg together and fold it towards the center, about an inch inwards. Then roll up your burrito from the right or left side of the fold, and there you go! To help it stay folded and shut, you can try placing the burrito back into the still hot skillet with the fold side down, and squishing the burrito onto itself with your spatula. Once you are satisfied, plate it again and eat it up!

So that's my roommate's secret, then: if you stir all of the ingredient together and make it into a tortilla-sized omelette, they won't fall out of the tortilla! And thus began the no-slip breakfast burrito. Mediocrity at its finest. 

Escape to Hogwarts

My grandma always made me hot tea with honey if I had a sore throat, and for most of my life, I thought this was the perfect remedy for such a thing--until recently.

Harry Potter and I have always been close. I started reading about his life of magic, misfortune, and adventure when I was about nine or ten and I felt like I grew up right alongside him. It was sad to see the series come to a close, but that didn't stop me from rereading the books on a fairly regular basis and indulging in ABC's Harry Potter Weekend almost every time it comes on TV. Because of my slight obsession, the idea of a real life glass of Butterbeer had crossed my mind once or twice.

The idea of combining the dream of Butterbeer with the dreariness of a winter cold came to me this past week as I was complaining about my poor, poor throat and reminiscing about Grandma's special tea. I don't know how Harry Potter was brought to mind or where the idea of substituting Butterbeer for the tea came from, but suddenly it was there! And I was ecstatic.

So of course my first course of action was to Google Butterbeer recipes. I waded through a bunch of potentials until I came to a particularly helpful-looking Yahoo link: "Harry Potter Top Ten Butterbeer Recipes" (http://voices.yahoo.com/harry-potter-top-10-butterbeer-recipes-473697.html?cat=22). It seemed like a good place to start.

Naturally there are many different versions, some sweeter and some thicker, some with alcohol and some without. On top of that, the Yahoo article is especially nice in that it recognizes that there are varying levels of complexity to consider as well, and so the recipes are categorized into three groups: "Easy Recipes," "Slightly More Complex Recipes," and "Complex Recipes." Right away I decided I was going to go big, or go home; I went with the very first one under the "Complex Recipes" category.

It went a little something like this:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups milk
2 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons hot chocolate powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ounce butterscotch schnapps for adults or butterscotch syrup for kids

Directions:

1. Melt butter and honey together

2. Add milk, sugar, vanilla, and butterscotch schnapps or butterscotch

3. Microwave or heat on stovetop until warm

4. Mix in hot chocolate powder and cinnamon

5. Serve

The first attempt, much like my first foray into steak frying, was a little disastrous. After following the recipe step by step and watching the saucepan carefully, I poured my Butterbeer into a tall glass beer mug, trying to imitate Harry Potter to a tee. The result was a very warm and sweet milk mixture that was sandwiched between a thick layer of hot chocolate powder on the bottom of the glass and an even thicker layer of powdery cinnamon across the top. When I tried to taste it, I just got a mouthful of pure ground cinnamon and nearly choked; I felt like I was doing the cinnamon challenge, and that was NOT okay with my throat.

But the second time around was much, much better. After Googling how to dissolve cinnamon in milk, I found out that you simply can't. Ground cinnamon is essentially ground tree bark, and so it just won't dissolve. The answer, therefore, was to use a cinnamon stick, and my, did this do wonders! I woke up this morning prepared with a new set of ingredients, plus a cinnamon stick, my still sore throat, and a hefty hangover (a little hair of the dog, ya know?). This time, my concoction was blissful. I got all the flavor of the recipe, including frequent spicy sweet flares of cinnamon, without the thick powdery texture of the ground version. The trick is to toss a stick into the pot as the milk mixture warms. Of course, a lot of the hot chocolate powder still sunk to the bottom, as hot chocolate powder is want to do even when being used for its intended hot chocolate-making purposes. But who doesn't like to lick up the chocolaty goodness at the bottom of their empty mug anyway?

So this adventure turned out, in the end, to be a both magical and soothing recipe review. Though rough at first, I managed to work out the kinks quite nicely. I'd love to revisit this article (http://voices.yahoo.com/harry-potter-top-10-butterbeer-recipes-473697.html?cat=22) again sometime to do a proper taste test to compare all the different versions and complexities, but for now, high complexity and cinnamon sticks all the way. Let me know if you ever try one of these, or some other recipe somewhere, and tell me how it turns out!

Because we can never have too much of him....

First-Time Steak Fryer

And now, for my real first post as a first-time food blogger...

Since before I can remember, my parents have referred to me as "The Carnivore." They particularly love to tell friends and family--and even the occasional friendly stranger--about the time when I was eleven and I ate three strips of bacon, a sausage patty, and a leftover bratwurst from the night before for breakfast. So of course, I'm a steak lover.

As a kid, I never needed to know how to cook my favorite dishes because Mom did that for me. But as a college student, I don't get to enjoy Mom's cooking as often as I'd like. For that reason, I felt it was about time that I buck up and learn to make steak for myself.

After stopping off at Walmart to pick up an inexpensive but hearty-looking pair of small sirloin steaks, my boyfriend and I went back to his apartment and set the packaged meat down on his breakfast bar. We looked at each other. Now what?

First, my boyfriend called a good friend of ours from back home who happens to be a very experienced griller, especially for someone our age. He recommends that for inexpensive meat like the sirloins we bought, soaking it in italian dressing for anywhere between 20 minutes and 24 hours would work just fine. Seeing as it was already 6:00 in the evening at this point, we settled for marinating the meat for about 30 minutes. What our friend could not tell us, though, was how to cook the steak in a skillet. He's been spoiled by always having access to fancy grills.

Naturally, the next person I called was my mom. We told her we didn't have a grill and planned to do it on the stove, but we just didn't know how. She was quick to get off the phone, in the middle of making her own dinner and that of my dad and two younger brothers as well, but also informative: use butter in the skillet, not Pam (for whatever reason), and cook each side for up to four minutes on medium-high heat. Sounds simple; it wasn't.

Once the steaks were all marinated, we did it just like she said, butter in the skillet, medium-high heat, four minutes on each side. Perhaps the key phrase in her instructions was up to four minutes on each side, because when we went to flip our test piece of steak (luckily, this was just a small experimental piece we had cut off, not our actual dinner yet) it was charred black on the cooked side, and when we cut it open the inside was still ruby red and bleeding.

Now, we like our steaks medium rare, and neither raw nor charred really fits into what we had been picturing for our yummy dinner. I was a little embarrassed; it felt weird that my mom could be wrong, and I felt dumb for not noticing that the meat was not only charring, but really starting to burn. I attributed it to being lost in the smell of melted butter and my eager chatting with my boyfriend about what we could have as a side dish--vegetables or potatoes. It was obvious that our procedure needed to be amended.

Monitoring their progress closely, this time around we set the burner to medium heat, and after about 3 minutes and 30 seconds on each side, give or take, our dinner steaks had turned a soft shade of tan. For the final test, we plated each one and started to cut into them: they were both a lovely bright pink on the inside.

We decided on steamed vegetables as our side, and the whole thing was pretty decent.  We each had a beer with dinner as a little reward to ourselves for figuring it out (plus, we were out of wine).

All in all, we reached a few conclusions about what it takes to make good steak out of cheap sirloin:

• Italian dressing makes for an incredibly easy and delightfully tangy marinade, even if you only marinate the meat for 30 minutes right before tossing it into the skillet. 
• Monitoring the meat is apparently important! Now I've recently read that you're not really supposed to move the steak as it fries, but for us, peeking under it occasionally as it cooked to see how it was doing was what worked. Maybe this was just a fluke, but I guess I won't know that until I try again sometime. 
• I think it was the thickness of our steaks that messed us up in regards to how long and on how much heat we should fry them. Had they been thinner, my mom's instructions would have probably worked beautifully. 
• And, I will definitely be making steak again in the future. 

How was the final product? Better than mediocre, good even, and now I can say I've done it more or less by myself (at least without my mom being physically present). I can only hope that my next mistake in the kitchen ends this fortunately. 

Whoops...

So for some reason, I just can't seem to get the "About" page to work. I don't know if anybody out there can see it, but when I visit my blog, it doesn't show anything posted on that page. To start, then, here's my "About" section. Hopefully I'll have the actual page up and running soon, but until then...

I can cook enough to keep myself from starving, but

there are a lot of common dishes out there that I've never even attempted to make. Like steak, for example, or fettucini alfredo, or hard boiled eggs. These are things that I've eaten many times before and absolutely love, but that I just never learned to make by myself. That's where this blog comes in. Generally, I want to figure out how to cook the things I like to eat, and here is where I'm going share my sure to be haphazard learning experience so that anyone else who's curious and interested can learn from my mistakes. So here's to an adventurous semester of lots of trial and error, and maybe even a few more-than-mediocre meals!

I'd like to post something new about twice a week, and hopefully at least one of those posts will involve me learning my way through a new recipe. Though I'm starting this blog as a class project for my Food Writing course, I've always wanted to blog, and I hope I can keep it up just for fun even after the course is over!