Kitchen Zink - Throwing it down (again)

So if you like cooking so much, how come you never write about it?  I can hear you thinking that as you read post after post about boring New Year's resolutions and movies no one's ever heard of.  (Kidding, of course.  Sometimes I make Stacia watch these movies with me. ;)  Well, the short answer is that I haven't actually done a lot of cooking the past few months.  Things get so crazy around the holidays, plus we took two winter trips to follow the NCAA volleyball tournament.  Add that all up and there weren't a lot of weekends we were home to shop and meal plan.  Fortunately, we did make a plan this past week, shopped, and were able to cook almost everything on the list.

The meal plan for last week included:
 - Margherita pizzas, using our pizza stone and new pizza peel
 - Cajun shrimp and rice
 - NY Strip steaks with spinach salads and oven-roasted potatoes
 - Coriander-crusted pork tenderloin with garden green beans and mashed rutabagas
 - Turkey thigh mole with rice

Looking back, there were a lot of revelations this week.  Among them, we have a long way to go to perfect making pizzas; mole takes a heck of a long time to make; rutabagas are not really that tasty; we can preserve our harvest without getting botulism though the beans were pretty mushy; and Better Homes and Gardens' version of Cajun is quite a bit different from mine.

Perhaps the coolest lesson, though, was the new method to cook steaks, learned from the helpful folks at America's Test Kitchen.  Assuming you're not a fan of grilling in January, the trusted method is to sear the outside of the steak in a pan, then finish cooking in the oven.  It's one of those "restaurant secrets" that, once you learn it, you wonder why you haven't been doing it that way all along.  Anyway, as great as that is for many foods, the ATK guys flipped it on its head for steaks.  They have you start in a 275 oven until the steak is 90 degrees (or you can estimate - we did about 8 minutes for a 1/2 to 3/4 inch steak).  After that's done, you pull it out and sear it off in a pan.  The result was incredible - the most evenly cooked medium-rare steak I've ever had.  Not to be too superlative, but it could well be the best steak I've prepared myself.  We don't eat steak often, but we're gonna try this method again next time, and if it bears out, it's the new Zink family technique.

That's not what I came here to write about, though.  I was going to talk about this past weekend's breakfasts, the unwitting subject of another Zinkthink Throwdown!  It all started some time ago, in the long-since forgotten era when you could dine outdoors.  Stacia and I were grabbing breakfast on the patio at Panera, and we each, for the first time, ordered the "souffles."  (Note: these are not even remotely soffles.  They are more like pastry crust baked egg dishes, but that doesn't sound anywhere near as sexy.  If you've been to Panera, you know the things I'm talking about.)  We'd always tended toward the breakfast sandwiches before, but a fresh batch of "souffles" came out whilst we were in line, so we gave them a shot... and they were yummy.  We immediately decided we needed to learn how to make them on our own.

And we did.  We replicated them quite well, then naturally we entirely forgot about it and kept to our usual morning staples of cold cereal, steel-cut oats or fried eggs on toast, month after month.  Then this week Stacia decided she wanted our egg souffles again, and we had to figure it all out from scratch.  Saturday's result was okay, but it ended up needing a last-minute zap in the microwave to fully set the eggs.  Sunday went better, but we still need to refine things.  Here's how things stand at the moment:

First, you get your mise en place (haha) by prepping the fillings.  Part of the fun of doing this yourself is you can put whatever you want into the souffle.  The first time we sauteed some peppers and onions, which was great.  This time, we had fresh spinach and Van de Rose bacon on hand, so we used that.  I simply tore the spinach into pieces while Stacia fried and cut up the bacon into bite-sized pieces.  Next, Stacia took a couple of regular refrigerator biscuits, and rolled them out with a rolling pin.  I scrambled up some eggs, and (on Sunday anyway - lesson learned) cooked them partway on the stovetop.  This was pretty key, since our first batch, cooked from raw in the oven, never set up quite right.  Once the eggs started to congeal a bit, we threw in the fillings.

We pressed the flattened biscuits into a couple of ramekins sprayed with cooking spray (pretty vital if you don't want yours to stick like ours did on Saturday!) and poured in the egg mixture.  For a standard-sized ramekin, one biscuit makes a nice shell, and two eggs pretty well fills up to that crust level.  Then you just throw it in the oven at some temperature for some amount of time.  As you might guess, that's one of the areas  yet to refine.  On Sunday, which worked okay, I think we were at 350 and cooked for 15 minutes, threw on some shredded cheese and did 5 minutes more.  They came out decently, but there were some isolated soft places in the biscuit crust.  Using a couple of forks, you can pull the "souffles" out of their ramekins, and presto! you have your own homemade customized Panera breakfast!  A slight temperature/time change might help that, and will be explored in the next go-round.

Now, this was never intended to be a throwdown at first, but that all changed as we ate our tasty egg bake thingys on Saturday morning.  Our initial effort needed some work, and that batch had only used two of the eight biscuits in the tube.  With another weekend day and a few more biscuits, why not try to get it down pat?  As I documented, the results were better on Sunday, but not good enough to get me to write down and keep the recipe.  There are still four biscuits left in the tube and a few more mornings this week before they get funky.  I think with two more efforts, we can nail this one.  If I do, I'll be sure to post the updated recipe.

I know it's nothing fancy; you may expect a cooking fan to make much more elaborate meals.  In many ways I do, but very seldom of my own creation and from my own mind.  So starting with a simple dish seems like a good way to kick off my learning-by-doing process for '11.  If we can replicate what Panera makes, that's an accomplishment in my book.  And if it saves us a few bucks in breakfasts out, all the better.  Stay tuned for updates from this throwdown, and some hopefully more exciting dishes as the year progresses!