I love eggs. Not just any kind of eggs, mind. The kind of eggs that come from happy chickens. Eggs with real yellow yolks that show the chicken’s been scouring the yard for something good for a chicken to eat. Eggs where the yolk sits up when you break it, instead of spreading out kind of depressed all over the plate. Real eggs. Not those crap eggs you get from torture chickens for about $1.50 a dozen, which make you think bleakly, for some reason, of World War II.
So when the foxes got all of Dawn the Egg Lady’s chickens last year, we practically went into mourning around the house. I mean there was no replacing the eggs that come from Dawn’s chickens. Those chickens lived in a cozy henhouse attached to the back of the house, they spread out during the day all over the garden, apparently unafraid of the three black Lab dogs they shared it with. They ate scraps. And their eggs were the kind of eggs you dream about if you are given, as I am, to dreaming about eggs.
The last year has been a makeshift one, with us bravely trying various types of Chino free range and organic eggs (fine, expensive, and not particularly an egg to make you immediately think of eggs for dinner), and local eggs on sale at the Co-op. I always try to get local eggs before they disappear into someone else’s shopping cart (they go fast around here, those local eggs), but even when I do get them, I can tell a big difference between them and the Eggs of Dawn the Egg Lady. The only thing I can figure is the chickens that laid them must all get fed corn. There’s a kind of pallid uniformity to the taste that makes me suspect those chickens rarely see a potato peel or a stray cantaloupe seed. The yolks aren’t nearly as rich as the ones in Dawn’s eggs, and they don’t make the Beloved Vegetarian Husband give a contented sigh when he eats them, either. He likes them, all right, but I don’t get the aural cues I’m waiting for.
When Dawn told me her new chicks were finally full grown and up and laying, and they had eggs coming out of their ears at her house, and when were we coming to get some more eggs? I practically wanted to proclaim a national holiday. I went immediately over to their little wood house at the end of a long, still very snowy, rutted drive and got my first dozen. And when I got home and said, “I’ve got Dawn’s eggs!” it was terribly satisfying to see on Alex’s face the look he normally reserves for artisanal beer. He knew he was going to get them for dinner. And he did, of course. We had asparagus and fried eggs and butter and Parmesan over potato puree, followed by a salad with walnut oil dressing. Glass of white wine for me, stout for him. And he gave that sigh I was waiting for, too.
This is how:
For the potato puree, peel as many potatoes as you think you’ll want, and just cover them with water. Add as many peeled garlic cloves as you like, and a bay leaf—a sprig of thyme, if you have one lying around, is nice. Bring to a boil and cook gently until the potatoes are tender, then put them, the cooked garlic cloves, along with some of the potato water they cooked in, into a heatproof bowl. Add a dollop of butter, if you like. Either mash with a masher or, if you like them smoother, puree with a hand mixer, adding more potato water as needed to make a puree as loose or as tight as you like. I like a loose one for this purpose—one that will spread out over the bottom of the plate and soak up any yolk that manages to make it past the asparagus. Salt and pepper to taste, and add a couple of scrapings of fresh nutmeg. Cover and keep warm in a low oven.
While all of this is going on, put some lettuce in a bowl, keep the walnut oil and lemon wedges handy next to it. Run a wedge of Parmesan down the side of the grater that gives you nice thin long slices. Hold these for later.
Put a pan of water large enough to hold the asparagus flat on to boil. Salt it. Add as much asparagus as you want. Boil briskly till you can pierce the asparagus on their ends easily with a knife. Lift them out onto a towel set on a heatproof plate and set in the oven with the puree.
Gently fry as many eggs as you like—I go for 2 a person. You can use whatever method you like. I personally like to heat the pan, throw some butter in, tip the eggs in from cups (that way I know they’re not going to break in the pan), salt and pepper, clap a lid on, and instantly turn off the heat. I let them sit for about five minutes before I check and see if they’re done the way I like them, which is with a quivering but cooked white and a liquid gold yolk. (You may feel differently about your egg cooking process, and I certainly wouldn’t argue with anything that gets the job done.)
Now it gets fun. Spread warm potato puree on plates. Put the asparagus on top—they look nice if they’re all facing the same way. Lift the eggs and put them on top of the asparagus. Meanwhile, heat the egg pan again, and throw in a tablespoon of butter for each person while you arrange Parmesan slices on top of the asparagus. When the butter bubbles and turns brown (don’t let it blacken), pour on top of the Parmesan/egg/asparagus edifice. Serve right away, preferably with a glass of white wine. Encourage guests to spear the egg yolks and let them run all over the rest of the plate.
Have at it.
When you’ve finished with that, toss the lettuce with a little salt and pepper and walnut oil and a squeeze of lemon. I like about a 2 to 1 proportion of walnut oil to lemon, but you’ll have your own ideas. Serve that out on the same plates you served the asparagus on. In the unlikely event there is any yolk or potato left, the salad mingles with this quite nicely.
(And while we’re at it, here’s another recipe particularly good with Dawn’s eggs. Make some duxelles, which are essentially the old mushrooms they mark down at the market, chopped finely and cooked for a long, slow time with butter, a little garlic, a little thyme, salt and pepper, till all the moisture cooks out of them, and they’re an evil looking rich tasting mess. You can freeze these easily, and this dish is a breeze if you have. Cook some pasta, about ¼ pound for each person. Penne is nice for this. Whisk the freshest, best eggs you can find in a warm serving bowl big enough to hold the pasta—I reckon one egg per person. Salt and pepper. Add as much grated Parmesan as you feel like. Heat the duxelles with a little white wine and/or a little cream, depending on how you feel and what you’ve got. When the pasta’s done, drain it—not too thoroughly, a little pasta water lubricates everything nicely—and toss with the eggs and Parmesan and duxelles. Serve on warm plates with a glass of red wine and a green salad to follow. Heaven. Really.)
Another thing to do with Dawn’s eggs . . .
Eggs poached in roast tomato/chipotle chile sauce.
Black beans refried.
Avocado/jalapeno/cilantro/scallion/lime salad.
For the sauce:
Take about a pound and a half of tomatoes, cut in half, roast at 250° for a couple of hours, till a little blackened on the edges.
Finely mince a small onion and two garlic cloves, sauté till soft in a tablespoon of oil. Add the tomatoes, diced. Add a finely chopped chipotle chile, and a couple of teaspoons of its sauce. If this needs a little liquid, add some light beer.
Cook till lightly thickened.
Wrap some corn tortillas in foil and put in a 350° oven.
Put casserole, with cooked black beans that have been mashed into hot oil in which onion and garlic has been fried, into oven to warm while you do the rest.
Make four indentations in the sauce. Slide a raw egg into each indentation. Turn heat on low, cover, leave for seven minutes.
Meantime, the salad: mince lots of cilantro, scallions, one seeded jalapeno. Add diced avocado. Squeeze wedge of lime over all. Mix with one tablespoon of bland oil. (I use sunflower, but flax oil would be another good choice, and even healthier.) Add salt.
When eggs are set, put tortillas on plates (two to a plate).
Spoon sauce and eggs onto them—careful not to break the eggs. Put beans on top of a little mound of lettuce if you like, garnish with avocado salad.
Very good with beer.
Even with expensive organic eggs, this meal shouldn’t cost more than $3 for two.
And you sleep very well afterwards.
Another lovely thing to eat (among the many, many lovely things to eat that there are) is egg custard, and I mean savory egg custard, the kind that you serve in a little glass ramekin on the side of something light and healthy for dinner, not for dessert. Easy on the stomach, easy on the checkbook, easy on the eye. Looks tough to make, so you get a lot of credit from your loved ones as they dip a careful spoon through the stuff and savor the first tender bites on their collective tongue. Useful. Useful, easy, frugal, and good—I mean, really, what more do you want out of life, let alone dinner?
This is how:
For two people (for four, just double):
Beat two eggs with a half teaspoon of light oil and some salt. Add a quarter cup minced cilantro, more or less. Then, add slowly, beating as you do, three quarters of a cup of hot water. (This, according to Maggie Gin’s original recipe, is what makes the custard so tender.)
Divide between two Pyrex custard cups. Then lower into a steamer basket set over a pot of boiling water. Steam for about ten minutes, till a toothpick inserted comes out clean. (You can cook this in one larger heatproof bowl, in which case I think it would take about fifteen minutes.)
Sprinkle custards with minced green onion. I drizzle some oyster sauce on top. You can sprinkle them with soy sauce instead—that’s equally delicious. A tiny bit of sesame oil, if you like the taste, goes well, too.
There are just about a million permutations you can apply to this recipe, if you feel so inclined (add sautéed mushrooms, add cooked spinach, skip the Asian flavors altogether and add cheese, etc.), but I never seem to get beyond this one.
(We’d had an extra lavish meal type weekend, as it was the Beloved Husband’s birthday, so this came as part of a pulling-ourselves-back-together type meal: steamed brown rice topped with sautéed cabbage and soy sauce, and avocado halves with lemon juice on the side. We both felt light and happy afterwards. Come to think of it, we’d both felt light and happy after his birthday dinner, which involved four courses, sourdough bread, a bottle of rosé champagne, wine and extra desserts, so the secret here, I guess, is not to do the same thing all the time . . .)
I try not to experiment with more than one new, unfamiliar kind of wild mushroom per year. I’m one of those hyper-cautious types who begins envisaging liver damage immediately on consumption (although I am also one of those types who is physically incapable of seeing a mushroom growing in the wild without speculating on how it would taste with garlic and cream). And there was this one particular kind of spongy bulgy thing that popped up in the woods, sometimes in huge numbers, that I’d had my eye on for some time. I’d been trained by a professional mushroom guy to recognize a similar one, so I knew this was a type of bolete . . . and I knew there are a limited amount of toxic boletes, and those will generally not kill you, just make you really, really sick. So, I figured, I had a good shot. I have, after all, three different mushroom books (the best by far is David Arora’s Mushrooms Demystified—highly, highly recommended). At the very worst, I’d have an unpleasant gastro-intestinal experience. Which was not the most terrible thing that could happen.
Still, after gazing at the two huge, gnome-home specimens we found next to the spring, I was nervous, as usual. I knew for sure—I thought—that they were some kind of Slippery Jack. Edible for sure—I thought. And when they blued a little bit where I cut them on the stem, I was more sure—I thought. Douglas Fir loving, no red pores, fruiting most around Thanksgiving in the Pacific Northwest. Hah. Got you. “I’m absolutely sure about this one,” I announced to Alex, who was, as usual before dinner, on the phone and the computer and the beer mug all at the same time.
“I was sure you were,” he said amiably. I have a promise from him that he will never, ever, ever eat a wild mushroom before I’ve vetted it. Alex’s tendency is to leap first and look to see how many stories down afterwards, and, as I hope to keep him well into old age, certain precautions must be taken.
I was sure all right. Still, I went back to the books—all of them—three more times and read about all the possible toxic species that might even remotely resemble those lying on my kitchen counter. There wasn’t one that was even close. So I’m safe.
I think.
So I fry up a bit of the mushrooms, dry, with garlic salt, and then a little added butter, and we taste. Just a bit for each of us. Hours before dinner, so if there’s anything wrong, boy, will we know about it before I make them into a meal. We taste. A little watery, which tells me how to cook them later. But meaty. And good. Really good.
They taste like the woods on a winter’s day. Now I relax. I am a great believer in my body telling me when something’s wrong. And what my body was saying was, “This is good. Thank you.”
So I was happy about those mushrooms.
At dinner, this is what I did with them:
I peeled off the slimy top skin, and pared away the dirt on the stems. Then I diced them. Put a pan on the burner at medium high heat and then the mushrooms went in dry. I fried them till they were nice and crisp and brown on the outside, then I glugged in some extra virgin olive oil and a bunch of minced garlic . . . and a handful of minced parsley.
Salt and pepper. Let them cool.
For two of us, I beat six of the Egg Lady’s eggs. More chopped parsley. Salt and pepper. Then I added the cooled mushrooms. Some grated Parmesan. Topped with more grated Parmesan.
Cleaned the mushroom pan. Preheated the broiler. Heated the pan to where a drop of water sizzles on the surface.
Glugged in some olive oil. Added the eggs. Lifted them up, let them run around the pan. Cooked on lower heat till they were browned on the bottom. Slid them under the broiler till browned on top.
Wild mushroom omelet.
We had this with thin sliced potatoes cooked over high heat in duck fat. Tomatoes roasted for a couple of hours. A big salad with mesclun, walnuts, scallions, and blue cheese.
And we were very happy. As of this writing, still no liver damage. So that’s another mushroom species happily identified as completely edible, and my forays into the natural world continue, with anticipation and the greatest, greatest, greatest possible respect . . .
While walking in the woods behind the house, and thinking about our dinner as a way of anchoring my thoughts in general, I couldn’t decide between cold soba noodles with a radish salad, or something to do with cheese and broccoli. It was a very hot day, very humid, with the promise of thunderstorms clearly behind it. And there in front of me, having sprouted up that morning, was a log covered with oyster mushrooms.
I know oyster mushrooms. They and morels are the two wild mushrooms I do know very well. And know how well they taste, too.
That decided it. For dinner we had:
Oyster mushrooms salad with baby kale and daikon leaves.
Broccoli tian with onions and Cheddar cheese.
Here’s how to make the salad:
Take however many mushrooms you have, of any type (wild is best), and, having gotten rid of the grit and sliced them into manageable sizes, throw them into a hot pan in which butter and olive oil have heated. On top, throw much minced garlic and chopped scallions. Salt now (don’t stint; mushrooms need salt). When the mushrooms have cooked, squeeze lemon on top of it. Then throw a lot of chopped parsley into it. And add a few glurgs of cream.
When all of this has amalgamated, toss with hardy lettuce leaves, like baby kale, or escarole, or turnip tops, or baby chard, or a sturdy mesclun mix. (If you want to use lighter lettuces—lamb’s lettuce, butter lettuce, etc.—dress the leaves lightly with oil and lemon juice, and put the mushrooms on top, rather than mixing them in.)
Serve IMMEDIATELY, with a glass of red wine, and eat very, very slowly.
Follow by whatever course you think best. As, come to think of it, one should always do in life when one can.
The Mushroom Man at the Growers’ Market always has something fascinating on his table, and whether it’s because of the mysterious quality of the various fungi, or the fact that I know he’s foraged for all of it in the mountains ringing the valley, or something else entirely, every week I’m absolutely riveted by the display. I spend a lot of time mooning about what I might do with those trompettes des morts, those hedgehog mushrooms, those morels.
One spring week, I stopped to greet him and eye his wares as usual, and halfway through a sentence my eyes widened. There was a heap of little marble-sized, dirt covered balls, and a sign that said: Oregon truffles.
“Not really,” I said.
“They won’t be here long,” he said.
Now I’d heard we grew truffles in Oregon, and I’d seen them in the mushroom books, and I’d been more than a little entranced by the general romance of them. I’d only ever eaten fresh truffles once, in creamy scrambled eggs at La Regalade, in the 14th, in Paris—at which meal I was so overwhelmed by the huge terrine on the table, and the wine the couple at the next-door table offered us from their bottle, and the guys on the other side of me tucking into what looked like an entire steer, that I hardly took in a separate truffle flavor. But of course it’s the legend of truffles that’s the important thing. I mean, if you’ve read Colette, or Joseph Wechsberg, on the subject, truffles stay with you forever as a kind of fairy tale. A European myth. So the idea that they were here in Oregon, too—there was a certain quiet satisfaction in that. Or, as Thoreau so pertinently said, “I walk not toward Europe, but toward Oregon.”
So I bought one. Of course I bought one.
I told the Mushroom Man I was going to cook it in creamy soft scrambled Egg Lady eggs, and he thoroughly approved of that. He told me to hold out my hand, and then he pressed a knuckle and said, “That’s how they feel now.” Then he pressed the skin between my knuckles, and said, “That’s how they feel when they’re ready to eat. They’re ready about 12 days after I’ve picked them. And they don’t wait for you! You eat when the truffle is ready, okay?”
No question, I said. I always eat when the food in question is ready. It’s part of my partnership agreement with the Good Life. He nodded and put the small black thing into a little plastic container and handed it over with a certain solemnity.
The next day I smelled the truffle. It smelled faintly sweet, but nothing very overwhelming, and I put it away again. But two days later, it smelled intensely of . . . what? Of nothing else I could think of. Something familiar, but nothing I could name. Violet pastilles, I thought, but that wasn’t quite it either. I was a little taken aback by this—I’d somehow imagined something musky, something a little more earthy and less perfumed. Well, it was earthy. But not in the way I’d thought. Not like mushrooms. More like . . . cheese and hay.
By the next day, the violet smell was even stronger, crossed with a kind of smell of green grass and wet dirt. I felt the truffle thoughtfully and decided I probably had about two more days before it got to where the Mushroom Man said it should. So the next day, I took out a little nailbrush I keep for cleaning mushrooms and scrubbed the truffle till it looked like a speckled malted milk ball. The smell kept rising up off it, and our little dog licked my hands with special enthusiasm after, even after I washed them. Then I minced half of it up finely and mixed with 5 of Dawn’s eggs and 1 egg yolk, for them to sit and soak up the flavors overnight.
I saved the other half of the truffle. Half of that we had grated over that night’s pasta and butter and cheese, and the aroma was definite, though more elusive than I liked. I’d made a mistake by putting a lot of parsley in the sauce, and that made everything too complex; you could almost catch the truffle taste, but then it would fly off in a different direction. With all that parsley in there you couldn’t quite separate the flavor out. So I wouldn’t make that mistake the next night.
The next night would be strictly butter and eggs and cream and truffles. As for the remaining quarter of raw truffle, that I planned to grate on the eggs after they were done, to be warmed by their heat alone.
So the next night, with a certain sense of occasion and curiosity, I opened a bottle of rosé. Poured out a glass. Got the egg bowl out of the fridge. When I lifted the lid, the smell flowered up at me. It was startling, the power of it. And what was in it, I wondered? What was that scent? Violets, for sure—but violets mixed with ripe cheese and hay. That’s about the best way I can describe it. I pondered this briefly, along with the beautiful black and gold marble of the truffled eggs. Then I shook myself, and got down to business. I smeared a lot of butter around the inside of an earthenware cazuela I’d brought back from Spain. I put that on a flame tamer, and, pouring the eggs in, I turned the heat on low.
Meanwhile, I toasted four big pieces of local sourdough bread, and kept them warm in the oven.
I put a salad ready to be tossed on the table—dressing of lemon, thyme, garlic, walnut oil, blue cheese, with diced avocado and toasted hazelnuts in the bottom of the bowl; salad spoon and fork crisscrossed on top; mesclun leaves heaped on top of those.
I stirred the eggs pretty continuously for about twenty minutes, until they were a creamy amalgam—at one point adding a glug of cream to slow the cooking down, and finishing them with a tablespoon or two of butter cut up and stirred till melted, so we’re not talking a spa dinner here—and then I poured them on the bread and grated what was left of the truffle on top.
Alex’s eyes got wide after he took the first bite. “This doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever eaten before,” he said. “What about you?” I laughed, because all of a sudden I was back at La Regalade, and now I knew what that elusive flavor was I’d been too over stimulated at the time to take in then.
“Yes,” I said. “Just one other time.”
And we talked about Oregon, and how glad we are to live here, and I had another glass of rosé, and the night went quickly, too quickly, which is the way it’s supposed to be with good nights, I guess.
