Blue Cayenne

It started with a food picture as so many of my culinary adventures begin. 

It was a New York Times Food piece on Los Angeles’ Konbi Restaurant’s Egg Salad Sandwich–an elegant riff on the 7-Eleven Egg Salad Sando sensation in Japan. 

But…it was hard. Really hard.

Slicing the sandwich to leave the egg halves intact challenged my limited skills. So, I kept trying. What was the downside, I kept asking myself? Eating all those experimental egg salad sandwiches? I could do that. 

While my quest was going on, my good friend Joyce was making a trip to Japan with her daughter, Dina.

Test out those 7-Eleven sandwiches, I told them. They are supposed to be a real treat.

So, test they did–sending me photographs of their sandwich “finds” as they travelled around Japan. Boy, was I envious. There were no sandwiches, though, with that Konbi whole egg magic–just beautiful traditional egg salad sandwiches. 

So, when Joyce returned from her trip, she turned up on my doorstep one day with lunch. There they were, beautifully prepared Konbi sandwiches direct from Joyce’s kitchen using the NYT recipe. We feasted and I pressed Joyce for tips on how to slice the sandwiches to retain their beauty.

Inspired by my friend’s success, I’ve kept going with my Konbi Sandwich efforts using the NYT Konbi Egg Salad Sandwich recipe here.

Here is my sandwich. It is kind of rustic looking in a Picasso-esque way but it is ever so good–test sandwich after test sandwich. 

Guess I’ll just have to keep testing. Poor me. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

Quiche: Let me count the ways.

I’ve made my share of quiches—some of them wonderful, some of them “meh.” One of my all-time favorites was a deep-dish asparagus quiche served at a women’s charity event I attended with my friend Sarah. I’m still working on recreating that one. 

Here is a great Spinach and Gruyere Quiche recipe I previously posted on Blue Cayenne: Spinach and Gruyere Quiche.

This recipe is probably the simplest “formula” recipe I’ve come across and the end result was savory and wonderful.

The recipe is from a popular cooking site named Sally’s Baking Addiction. You can find the original recipe here including a crisp and wonderful flaky pie crust recipe. 

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.

Cookies never get old. 

These Oatmeal Brown Sugar Cookies are a delight worth adding to your repertoire of cookie recipes.

This recipe is from the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen Cookbook Shelf Love. The cookie is called Verena’s Road Trip Cookie in the book.  It is a great cookbook full of recipies you can generally put together with ingredients you have on hand. Who doesn’t need those kinds of recipes now and again? The cookbook is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

The special ingredient in this cookie recipe is the brown butter, an ingredient known as beurre Noisette in French cooking. Brown butter is a wonderful ingredient in lots of dishes–both sweet and savory. Martha Stewart calls the sauce “intoxicatingly fragrant and impossibly silky.” That is a pretty strong endorsement if you ask me.

So, what is brown butter? It is product of watchfully heating unsalted (sweet) butter until the Maillard (or browning) reaction occurs. The butter heats to the point that the water in it boils off and the milk solids in the butter sink to the bottom and, depending upon how long you cook the butter, turn shades of dark brown and develop a nutty flavor. This term, Maillard reaction, is named after a French scientist named Louis-Camille Maillard whose early 20th Century experiments explained the science of the process. The Maillard reaction occurs in the cooking of many foods other than butter including bread crusts, chocolate, meats, and coffee beans.

Here is the Oatmeal Brown Sugar Cookie recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

This is a very rich cookie–the kind of cookie that you only need to eat one to be satisfied.  OK…maybe two.