Heavenly Sausage and Eggs Casserole

Heavenly Sausage and Eggs (another sensational low carb recipe)

No, you have not had sausage and eggs like this supremely delicious offering.  Not at Denny’s, not at McWhat’s it, not in Aunt Julie’s Emporium for Holistic Eating and Meditation, although, you will be thinking about this meal for a long time. 

The secret is an unusual ingredient, not in the same sense as pickled Madagascar squirrel, or Chinese wrinkled yeast, just something not normally found in culinary association with sausage and eggs.

This is a dish you’ll want to serve for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  At lunch and dinner, I like to add a cucumber salad.  And afterwards a medicinal brandy or two.

Heavenly Sausage and Eggs

Pre-heat oven to 350ºF (180ºC)

Grease an 8 inch X 8 inch (20 cm X 20 cm) baking pan (glass or metal)

¾ Pound (300 g) loose sausage (I make my own. See below)

6 slices sandwich size Swiss cheese

1 Ball of fresh mozzarella di bufala cheese (about 1/3 pound, 125 g)

5 Eggs

1 Cup unsweetened coconut milk (not coconut juice or cream) Be sure to mix this well before using. Often the top of the can is thick and the bottom watery.

1 Green bell pepper, diced

1 Yellow bell pepper, diced

½ Red onion, diced

Salt and pepper

1 Level teaspoon dried marjoram

1 Level teaspoon dried Herbes de Provence

½ Teaspoon ground sage

Red pepper flakes

Ready to cook?

If you’re not using a commercial sausage:  Put ¾ pound ground pork, or beef, or a mixture in a bowl.  Add salt, pepper, and the dried herbs.  Toss in 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes and mix well. Not trying to make this HOT, just enough red pepper to put a slight tingle on the tongue. 

For either commercial or homemade versions, add a little oil to a frying pan and fry the sausage, breaking it up with a spatula as much as possible. When it has lost it’s color and beginning to brown, take it off the heat and set it aside. You want the sausage cooked, but still juicy.

In another frying pan, add a tablespoon of oil and fry the onion and bell peppers, only until wilted.  Set aside. (All you’re trying to do is cook the onion and peppers a little bit and also remove much of the water.)

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl and add the coconut milk. Toss in salt and pepper to taste, along with just a pinch or two of red pepper flakes.  Mix well.

Putting It All Together in Three Layers:

Put only enough of the egg mixture in the baking pan to cover the bottom.  Sprinkle in 1/3 of the cooked sausage and peppers/onion mix.  Add more of the egg mixture, then more sausage and peppers/onions.  Lay the Swiss cheese slices to cover.  Add the remaining egg mixture.  Put the last of the sausage and peppers/onions on top.

Rip up the ball of mozzarella and scattered it evenly over the top.

Bake for approximately 35-40 minutes, or until the center is firm and the top is beginning to brown. Hint:  just give the pan a little shake and you'll know if the center is firm.

Let the dish rest about ten minutes before serving.

Serve with Pinot Grigio, you wild man!  Even at breakfast?  Damn straight!

Spargelzeit - Asparagus At It's Best!

Find a nice restaurant... 

...near a vineyard

...with a certain casual elegance...

...order a dry white, or whatever the chef suggests

...a crisp salad...

Spargel with pan roasted potatoes and Weiner schnitzel

The same, but with turkey steak

In Germany, April brings Spargelzeit (Asparagus season).  You don’t have to mark your calendar.  Restaurant chalkboards everywhere brag “fresh asparagus.”

I view Spargelzeit not only in culinary terms, but also as a harbinger of spring.  Time to drop the top on the cabrio, change to cotton scarves, have a meal al fresco, find another table inside because the sun went behind a cloud and your wife spears you with an icy stare.  When you ask her what’s wrong and she answers “NOTHING!” You’re in trouble.  In this case ‘nothing’ may be translated as “Read my mind, you unfeeling bastard.”  The brave man would sit it out, the coward caves.  She liked it much better inside.

I confess to loving the changing seasons, something I missed where the weather was constantly warm.  Germany has a bunch of seasons to like.  Not just spring, summer, winter, and fall.  There’s asparagus season (April –June), pumpkin season (Sept-Nov), beer season (Ever heard of Oktoberfest?), new wine season (Sept-Oct), strawberry season (June), and kick hell outta the French season (no longer celebrated) to name a few.

In the United States, and I suspect elsewhere, vegetable and fruit seasons are a dying phenomenon.  Supermarket chains scour the globe to being you everything you want, all the time.  Pumpkins in the spring?  Grapes in January?  No problem. But, we lose something in the process of having everything.  What if you celebrated your birthday, or Christmas everyday?  I know what you’re thinking.  Damn, I don’t want to get that old, that fast!

Asparagus (Spargel) served in Germany is almost exclusively the white variety.  Thick, succulent, even a little sweet, the woody stalk must be peeled before it’s cooked, but it’s worth the effort. No wonder the Germans rightly refer to asparagus as edible ivory, or the king of vegetables.  Spargel season is something to celebrate.

Say, isn’t white asparagus the same as green asparagus?  Kinda. There’s no biological difference between white and green asparagus.  The big difference is in the way they’re grown.  In short, white asparagus isn’t allowed to see the sun.  Lots of ways to do that.  Pile dirt on it (called hilling).  Cover it with a black tarp.  Without sunshine, no photosynthesis takes place, hence the paleness.  The result is a much milder and sweeter stalk.  Because it grows longer (green asparagus must be picked young), white asparagus is larger.  Here’s the bottom line for me:  serve white asparagus with a light hollandaise sauce and suddenly everything else on your plate is a side dish.

Traditionally, asparagus is bundled and cooked standing up in salted, boiling water.  If you find it in a market, buy it now.  The season traditionally ends on 24 June, with the feast of St John the Baptist.

Want expert help in cooking and serving?  Put the top down, drive to a sensational restaurant near a vineyard and pick a table inside, with an outside view.  Just sayin’….

Gutshof Bauer's Stuben

Altdorfer Straße 3

67482 Venningen

Tele:  06323-27-34

www.gutshof-bauer.de

A Lunch to Remember

St Étienne rises from the center of Metz

St 

Inside the cathedral

A little Alsatian beer to whet the apetite

From inside Le Bouchon

Garlic butter at its best

A helpful staff member

In the confectioner's

Can't be lunch without dessert

I love Italian food, especially the cream dishes from the north.  Also fond of German, Japanese, Spanish, and … to save time, just glance at a map of the world.  But, as I’ve said before and will say again, until a court order shuts my blasphemous mouth, the French could teach anyone how to eat.

To make my point, I need only mention bread.  The baguette is so simple even a simpleton, or a vicious ex-wife could make it: flour, water, salt, yeast.  Lots of people, including the Germans, do a fair job.  But, for my taste buds, if it ain’t French, it ain’t a baguette. Nowhere else is the golden crust so wonderfully crunchy and the inside so delightfully chewy.

            After a tour of Saint ´Étienne, the Metz cathedral, it was time to put aside the political differences between the French and the rest of the world, break a couple of those baguettes, slosh some eau de grape, and spend what’s left of our shrinking American dollar. 

            What’s the difference between a bistro and a restaurant?  To my ever so humble eye, a restaurant is a self-contained, sit-down, eating establishment, while a bistro sells coffee in thimbles, and has a bar you can lean on when you see your bill.  Also a bistro’s the tables spill out onto the sidewalk like the pedals of a flower, where clusters of women in high heels and men with scarves gather to look down their Gallic noses at the rest of us.  Busy, obnoxiously well-groomed waiters flit about with martial like efficiency, delivering cream softened coffee, beer, wine, and full plates of things you can’t for the life of you find on the menu.  The beer in Alsace, by the way, is exceptional.

Bistros are quite the experience, but today we settled on Le Bouchon, a restaurant in every sense of the word, tucked into a corner of the bustling downtown.  Elegant tablecloths and napkins, glistening goblets, polished silverware, waitresses in black and white ensembles that make a man fidget and pray.  With my French pretty much limited to bonjour, au revoir and de la bière pour les chevaux, I had to be careful with the menu.  Once before, my arrogance led me to hastily call for rognon de veau, which turned out to be veal kidneys in a sauce far too mild to overcome my gag reflexes.

 This bright, sunny, hopeful day I went for the escargot, salade, entrecote avec béarnaise, pommes au gratin, and hericots vert.   For the uninitiated, or those who refuse to learn French because it makes you sound like you’ve got a serious sinus problem, I’ll offer a fighter pilot’s translation.  Snails, salad, rib steak, mayo with tarragon, toasted potatoes in a cream sauce and some green beans.  Again, it all sounds simple, but a French chef has that magic touch that channels the simple into the sublime.  Maybe it’s the creamy mixture for the potatoes combined with delicate browning, or the freshness of the eggs for the béarnaise.  Maybe it’s the rigid standards for culinary perfection in everything, from meat to the greens, to the politely wrinkled silk tablecloths?  Beats me, but it also beats most anything, anywhere outside of France.

The French do not eat, they dine, meaning unhurried conversation and unhurried consumption to the point of idle dawdling.  Dine we did, for the best part of two hours…actually the best part of any two hours you’d care to name.  I could go on about the food, the superb garlic butter on the escargot, the crisply tender green beans, potatoes that praised themselves, and the perfect doneness of that steak, but the photos do a better job.

After a meal like that, it was time for a short walk to a confectioner’s for coffee and dessert with the very young and beautiful.  Unfortunately, I stood out.

Lunch In Heidelberg

View from the Inside Out

A Wine Worth Mentioning

The Superb Ravioli

The Equally Grand Goulash

Jump a smooth, immaculately kept train for pocket change, sit back, read and watch the beautiful countryside stream by.  Get off in one of Germany’s most picturesque cities, Heidelberg, complete with a swiftly flowing river, an ancient university and an ancient downtown to match.  Have a quiet, unhurried lunch at a quaint restaurant, with superb food and wine.  Stroll the cobblestone streets.  Ho-hum, just another weekend lunch trip in Deutschland.

I could go on and on about Heidelberg, (and probably will when you least expect it and don’t have time to avoid it) but the quick answer is, it’s best just to wander the streets in the old city and find your own special favorites.

  One of ours is a small hotel and restaurant very near Heidelberg’s cathedral, The Church of the Holy Spirit (circa 1398).  The Hackteufel (Devil’s Cut) has all you’d want for an intimate luncheon for two.  Reeking with ambiance and old world charm, you walk inside and feel as if you’ve just entered the dining room of your warmest and most comfortable dream.  Low, tasteful lighting.  Full, yet subdued decorations.  A buxom waitress….wait, a sec, I mean a very demure, but efficient waitperson, who knew everything on the daily menu and had tasted enough wine to make me wish I had been there. 

In Europe, the wine is every bit as important as the meal and rightly so.  The wine list is also longer than the menu.  My wife ordered a Spätbugunder (Pinot Noir) Weißherbst rosé and I got a Portugieser red wine.  Both were wonderful.  I’ve never seen my wife quite so ebullient over a wine.  “Try this!” she said loudly enough to make the chef quiche in his pants.  Last time this happened was in church during a particularly raucous communion.  I tried the Spät and it was all she said and more.  Smooth. Beautiful floral nose.  Mixed fruits giving it a bare edge of sweetness.

For the main course, my wife ordered a minced lamb stuffed ravioli, lashed with delicate bacon, onion cream sauce and lightly oven baked with a mild, semi-hard Italian cheese, accompanied by mixed greens with vinaigrette.   This was a far cry from the Chef Boyardee ravioli of my misspent youth.  Far cry?  I don’t think the transatlantic cable would stretch that far. Light, yet flavorful, it gave a new perspective to ravioli.

I had a mixed burgundy goulash on a nest of spaghetti noodles.  Tender. Savory.  Luscious for lunch or anytime anyone lends you a fork.  This was the ‘special of the day’ and special it was!  I like my meat one of two ways, rare, or cooked until it’s falling apart.  The goulash was the latter and moreover, the sauce complimented the richness of the meat instead of simply masking a cheap cut.  Every bite delicious.

This was a lunch to remember and repeat….often, in one of the most romantic cities on earth.