lenten brunch

My mother took me out to lunch yesterday, and asked that I update the blog so a fish head isn't at the top anymore. Fair enough. I should write about My Sister's Kitchen soon, but will probably wait until I've had another meal there. For now - so much fish lately!

I had a package of Dover Sole filets from Trader Joe's, extremely thin and quick cooking - they take 3-4 minutes to pan-fry. Most of them I had with sides of pasta, and I'm going to blog about pasta soon, but they also made good sandwiches. This is two filets on a roll with baby kale, a little mayo, and Major Grey's chutney:



The thing about fish sandwiches is that you can use damn near anything you like as condiments and it'll work, which is a good way to keep things from getting repetitive. (Though as I write this, I am a little tired of fish and am glad to have made a batch of boiled peanut chili. Tomorrow is my weekly meat day, which will break up the monotony.)

Today I had a Lenten brunch of belly lox, eggs, and cream cheese. The eggs were soft scrambled. To me, there are two distinct schools of scrambled eggs. If you want your eggs to mainly be a vehicle for ketchup or the like, hard-scrambled with onions and maybe some cheese is the way to go. You whisk them with a little milk, you add them to the pan, stir enough to keep them from being an omelette, and cook till they're getting dry.

But soft scrambled eggs are a whole nother thing, one many people would say is the only right way to make scrambled eggs - but like I said, for me, they're just two different dishes. These are very good soft scrambled eggs, but not perfect soft scrambled eggs - the curds are too large and too firm:



To make perfect soft scrambled eggs, after gently whisking the eggs together with a spoonful of cream cheese, a couple spoons of cream, a little coriander seed, and a little dill, you add them to melted butter in a pan that's warm but not hot, and you cook them slowly, while constantly stirring.

Don't think of soft scrambled eggs as undercooked eggs, which hard-scrambled fiends seem to. Think of them as a custard without sugar and very little cream. You constantly stir. You want soft, fluffy, smooth. At one extreme you have something almost like a hollandaise, almost more of a sauce. I like curds a little more developed than that, and not so soft that it looks like yellow Cream of Wheat.

But like I said, the eggs here, the curds are larger than I intended - the pan was hotter than I wanted it to be, and once they were in the pan, there wasn't much I could do - they cooked a little too fast even though I removed the pan from the heat.

Some chopped belly lox was added right at the end. Alongside, pumpernickel toast with cream cheese and another slice of belly lox. Over everything, fresh-ground long pepper.