I am a gloriously productive person every time I return to the States. Blessed with a five-hour time difference from London, I arise at the I-do-lots-of-useful-and-important-things hour of 7am (a time of day I am generally unacquainted with, especially on vacation) and…I do lots of useful and important things.  Like bake lots of focaccia.

Okay, so obviously this is a relative usage of the words ‘useful’ and important’.'  But I do consider baking to be a valuable activity, particularly so over the holidays when the day’s activities consist primarily of getting together with family and eating, meeting up with friends and eating, catching up with old family friends and eating…you get the picture.  In such a gastronomically focused time, baking and other food production techniques grow to paramount importance.

Thus, I present to you the newest addition to my useful brunch party repertoire: The Wake and Bake Eggs. Simple, cheap, non-labor intensive, adaptable, and basically idiotproof.

At the beginning, with all this  unexpected morning time at my disposal, I enjoyed baking complicated dessert productions like the Orange Almond Coriander Polenta Cake from the most recent Rambling Restaurant dinner and the Carrot and Walnut Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting from the glossy and gorgeous Ottolenghi cookbook.

But other times, especially when you’ve got a whole group of people coming over and have multiple other dishes to prepare, it’s great to have a dish you can put together with little effort and little time. Hence, the baked eggs, which I know sounds gross to a lot of people – yes, I’ve seen your faces when I mention it – but it’s oh so easy and delicious and perfect for when you start adjusting to a new time zone and are no longer quite so gloriously productive before noon.

It’s also excellent for when you’ve got 10 people coming over for brunch and you don’t want to have to worry about the timing of scrambled or the production of poaching or the mess of frying for every single person. Also, baked eggs means one pan for extreme ease of dishwashing. Unless you happen to own an attractive selection of individually portioned ramekins, in  which case I am one-quarter disdainful of your arsenal of random and rarely used kitchen items and three-quarters seriously jealous.

Wakey Wakey Eggs and Bakey aka Baked Eggs In Tomato Sauce With Cheese

What You Need:

8 eggs or however many you plan to eat. At least 1 per person.

1 large can crushed tomatoes, 1 large can whole tomatoes (I like to chop a can of whole tomatoes to get more texture, but you can use all crushed if you’re lazy. If you’ve got fresh tomatoes, toss those in too).

1/2 cup shredded cheese – parmesan is great, I used a really tasty Parmesan/Asiago/Fontina blend

Chopped herbs – I used chives, thyme, chervil and tarragon, but only because they were already in the fridge.

What You Do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 while you dice the canned or fresh whole tomatoes and pour them into a roasting pan with

the crushed tomatoes.

2. Crack the eggs into the pan like so:

3. Sprinkle the top with herbs and cheese.

4. Stick it into the oven and wait. Depending on whether you like your eggs soft and runny or hard and firm, could be anywhere from 10-15 minutes or so. Poke a fork into the yolks to test every so often until the eggs have reached your happy level of doneness.  I like runny oozy yolks for prime egg and tomato mixing on just-baked bread.

5. Scoop out an egg for everyone. Dip bread into the hot cheesy tomato sauce. Gloat that you don’t have to stand in front of the stove doing individual eggs for all 10 of your friends.  Well done you.

I highly recommend serving alongside the reverse color spotted Cherry Tomato and Roasted Garlic Focaccia.

Nothing like a good wake and bake to celebrate the holidays…

At the last Rambling Restaurant of 2009, we served a trio of richly colored dips – chickpea hummous, beetroot hummous, and carrot cumin dip. So pretty in pink.

For maximum dippability, we prepared straight-out-of-a-hot-oven-and-onto-the-grill flatbreads. Take Moro flatbread recipe (recipe below), multiply by 15 (eek!) and you have a lot of steaming hot fresh bread  in your future. Also a lot of rolling pin action. Stop whining, it’s good for the arm muscles.

I know making your own bread for a meal sounds thoroughly unrealistic, but this pita-like bread only needs about 20 minutes to sit. This means you can take about five minutes to make the dough, let it sit while you chop vegetables or prepare something else, and have WOW-YOU’RE-AMAZING homemade bread to accompany your meal. Even if it’s only yourself you’re impressing, it’s totally worth it. Especially when you fold it over and stuff it with sauteed spinach and halloumi cheese and roasted eggplant and other such delights.

We followed up the onslaught of foldable starch and pretty bowls of mush with a Turmeric Lime Chili Chicken over a Roasted Eggplant, Pomegranate Seed, Scallion, Parsley, Mint, Tomato Fattoush with a dollop of Cumin Yogurt Sauce. It’s a lot of ingredients that somehow all work in symbiotic grace to produce a happy mouthful of amazing.

But a discussion of odd-sounding ingredients that don’t really seem like they’d work together but actually will blow your mind would not be complete without Chef foodrambler‘s dessert: Orange Blossom Almond Polenta Cake with Coriander Syrup.  You might not think you like coriander, but I DARE you not to like this cake. I like this cake so much I am actually going to make it right now for a Christmas Eve Day Brunch.  I also like you enough to show you this pretty picture which does no justice to the rich, moist, exotically sweet and just a touch of spicy cake perfection.

Garnish with a twist of orange, a sprig of cilantro, and a spoonful of honeyed syrup with dots of coriander seeds.  Staring at this picture makes me very happy that this cake is only several hours in my future.  For those of you gluten-free people out there (sis Irene Bean is testing out a potential gluten allergy),  this cake is made with polenta and not flour. Woohoo!

Now go find yourself some cake too. Happy holidays!

Moro Flatbread

What You Need:

1 cup flour
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp dried yeast
a bit less than 1/2 a cup lukewarm water
1 tbsp olive oil

NOTE: this amount makes about four small-plate size flatbreads, enough for one very very hungry carb fiend like me, or two normal people. Multiply appropriately depending on your eating party’s level of carbophilia.

What You Do:

1. Mix the flour and salt in a big bowl and activate the yeast in the water, if necessary.

2. Slowly pour the water and yeast into the flour and incorporate by hand. Once all the liquid has been mixed in, punch the dough around for a few minutes. If it’s too sticky, add a bit more flour. Add the oil and keep kneading until you have a single ball of dough with a relatively smooth texture and a bit shiny with oil.

3. Let sit, covered with a damp tea towel, for about 20 minutes.

4. Pull off small balls, larger than a golf ball but smaller than a tennis ball, and roll them out to your desired thickness onto a sturdy floured surface. A good rolling pin is handy here, but floured wine bottles work just as well.  We decided to go super-thin at Rambling Restaurant, but I like the thick and fluffy kind too.

5. Once the dough has been rolled out, you can either put them on a lightly floured baking tray or a lightly oiled pan. At RR, we decided to do both – stick it in a hot oven until they puff up and lose their wet doughy sheen, then finish off on a griddle pan for some tasty brownedness. Either way is delicious.

6.  Cook until puffy, browned, and yearning to jump into your mouth. Dip in something tasty and pat yourself on the back for having produced your very own homemade bread. That is, if your hands aren’t busy tearing apart your creation and stuffing it in your mouth.

like you enough to leave you with a picture so you can start drooling yourself.

i’m making focaccia for rambling restaurant tomorrow! i’m excited because it’s my first time doing any real cooking for our secret supper underground restaurant and because i’m currently in the midst of a focaccia obsession. i’m also a little nervous because it’s my first time doing any real cooking for our secret supper underground restaurant and it better be good because people are paying for it. yikes! i think it’ll be great, but bread can be temperamental and i really hope it doesn’t get angry with me tomorrow.

just to get some practice in (and stuff myself full of yummy carbs again) i played around with some more focaccia this evening. to make the dough, i followed the recipe from my last focaccia post in which i state that i can’t really be held responsible for any accuracy of measurements. wooooo, that was an understatement. in reading my own directions, i realized i had misremembered the milliliter to cup conversion and written down what would result in a watery goop rather than anything that might remotely resemble dough.  don’t panic – the appropriate corrections have been made to the recipe, which let’s all admit was loose enough to begin with. just adjust as necessary and it’ll be fine (p.s.  i will always do my best to transmit useful information, but  just use anything i say as a starting point anyway).

i had some zucchini, onion, and potatoes left over from my weekly organic vegetable bag, so i sliced them into very thin rounds with my discount shop cheese grater and managed to keep both thumbs intact this time. i am so wanting my own mandoline, not to mention my kitchenaid mixer and immersion blender from san francisco. sigh. anyway, it’s super easy to experiment with tasty focaccia combinations. just cut all your veggies into thin slices so they cook all the way through and lay them out on the dough between the second and third rising periods and poke the dough a bit in between the toppings. i sprinkled chopped sage and thyme on the zucchini slices, chopped rosemary on the potato slices, and onion rings over the whole slab. yum.

so pretty! then a long drizzle of olive oil and leave to rise for a final 45 minutes. stick in the oven until the smell becomes overwhelming, remove from oven and eat.

two random notes:

1. this focaccia can be a meal in itself, especially if you stick some cheese or meat or other vegetables in side. i sliced a huge square open when still warm and stuck in some slices of halloumi cheese. yuuuum.

2. often when i’m cooking or baking, i find myself hungry and impatient while my creations are in the oven. this probably stems from back in the day when i was like 10 years old and used to bake amazing apple pies with my babysitter lisa. after trimming the edges of the pie crust, we would bake the little irregular bits into cinnamon sugar cookies to eat while the pies were baking. perfect to tide over antsy children while the pies cook and cool and then are finally ready to eat.

unsurprisingly, i am still equally unable to wait for things to cook. in this case, if you get hungry while waiting for the focaccia to finish baking, you can fry up any leftover vegetable toppings really quickly because they’re already sliced so thin. just add a little olive oil to a frying pan and they’ll cook in just a few minutes. tasty with cheese, or eggs, or on a slice of toast…just save room for the focaccia!

i am not particularly good at following directions when it comes to baking. often, i am also bad at planning ahead to make sure i have/purchase all the ingredients necessary to make whatever i initially planned. i used to think that both those failings were major liabilities on the kitchen front, but i’ve decided that they can actually result in unexpectedly useful instances of discovery and creativity.

take, for example, the above roasted tomato focaccia. i made my first rosemary and sea salt focaccia last week, following this recipe from a spoonful of sugar as closely as my inattentive measuring and poor gram-to-cup conversion skills would allow. the result was a tasty but certainly not exciting sort of flatbread, a little too thin and a little too dry to be considered a really stellar focaccia.

upon attempting my second round of focaccia,  i had the brief thought that maybe i should pay better attention to the recipe, which seemed to work really well for the author. then i decided to screw it and go the opposite route. instead, i’d just make the adjustments i deemed necessary – i wanted it to rise more, so i added more yeast. i wanted a more moist bread, so i added more olive oil. i also found this recipe for perfect cherry focaccia from a chef from the river cafe (their menu makes for some very enticing reading btw; i shall venture there once i actually start generating an income).  i really like what this writer, stevie parle, says in the recipe:

‘Its hard to give a recipe for bread, as it is in the hands of the baker, use this recipe as a guide.’

stevie, i appreciate that. i’m going to stop feeling like i should follow recipes. i don’t usually for cooking, but for baking it always seems like you need exact amounts of your tsps and tbsps (or gms and mls and all those english abbreviations that make my life more difficult) or your cake will implode or something.  so my recipe for roasted tomato focaccia, borrowing heavily from stevie’s delicious sounding cherry focaccia, will be a bit of a non-recipe.  there are probably some good reasons why stevie does what (s)he(?) does, but it worked amazingly well for me the way i did it.  hope it works for you.

caveats: a) the only really important parts are bolded. the other parts may be mildly informative or my own superfluous blather. b) this is my attempted recreation of a recipe where i didn’t measure much. sorry if my amounts aren’t very specific or turn out to be wrong, but that’s the point of a non-recipe, right? trust your bread instinct and you’ll do fine.

roasted cherry tomato focaccia with mixed garden herbs

what you need:

about 25 cherry tomatoes

about 3 cups flour

about 10 g yeast (i used fast-action because that’s what they sell at the corner store. fresh would probably be better).

about 2 tsps sea salt

about 1 1/2 cups water

olive oil

herbs (i bought little pots of basil, oregano, thyme, and sage at the columbia road flower market last week and decided to experiment with all of them, plus the rosemary plant that i have somehow managed to not kill yet). feel free to choose the herb of your choice, they all tasted fantastic.

what you do:

1. mix the flour,  salt, yeast and water in a mixing bowl and start scraping it together by hand (if you use fresh yeast, you have to dissolve it in water first). if it’s too sticky, add more flour as necessary.

2. add a good pour of olive oil (i think i used maybe a 1/4 cup?) and mix it in until the dough gets a smoother and more pillowy feel. then knead it – punch it, roll it, make funny shapes with it – for about 10 minutes or 3 michael jackson songs or until, as stevie says, it gets  ‘soft and luxurious’.

3. put your slighty puffy dough ball back into a lightly oiled bowl and cover it with a damp tea towel. leave it for an hour or two (try to get some work done, in my case) and come back when it has doubled in size on its own like a magic sponge from when you were a kid. like a proud parent, i love checking on my dough to see how it has grown.

4. spread the dough out into a pan and leave it to rise another 45 minutes or so.

5. now comes the most satisfying part – use your finger to poke your dough in a grid (or whatever pattern you like, i won’t judge) and stick in the cherry tomatoes. prick them with a fork so they don’t explode in the oven (or in your mouth like hot lava pockets, as chris says) and then sprinkle your bread with herbs and a generous drizzle of olive oil. don’t be scared, olive oil makes everything taste better. leave for another 45 minutes or so and the dough should have risen around the shiny little red globes.

6. stick your masterpiece in the oven for about 30 minutes at 350° (that’s a total estimate, i still don’t really understand my british oven). in other words, just wait until it gets brown and amazingly yummy looking, then pull it out.

7. let cool so it just barely doesn’t incinerate your mouth, then promptly eat nearly half your incredibly delicious creation until you are uncomfortably full.  to be honest, i don’t quite recommend this last step, but i fully understand if you follow my lead and do the same. you may not be able to help yourself.

there are so many different variations to this recipe too – i’m excited to see what other tasty vegetable, herb, cheese, and meat combinations could result with experimentation. we might even serve some at this week’s rambling restaurant! i’ll let you know how it goes…