Egg Month Grand Prize Giveaway: Nomiku Immersion Circulator!

When I was brainstorming things to highlight for Egg Month, I asked myself, "What is the most un-Samin thing I could possibly do?"  

The answer was obvious: sous vide.  Cooking in plastic--not really my thing.  But a good slow-cooked egg, now that's something I can get behind.  Since eggs conveniently come packaged in a water-resistant shell, there's no need for plastic when cooking them sous vide.  In fact, there's no vide, really.  Just sous eau, I suppose.    

So I wrote an email to the good folks at Nomiku, asking if they'd contribute a machine for me to give away.  They wrote back in five minutes, responding with a hearty YES!

They sent me a unit, to mess around with, and then give away.  And I can say in all honesty that it's going to be hard for me to send it off.  It's pretty amazing...small, easy to use, intuitive.  It's a thing of beauty.

I confess, I haven't reinvented the wheel or anything--mostly I've just been cooking the eggs a few at a time, then adding them to brothy soups, or poaching them to serve over my usual dinner of rice and vegetables.  It's pretty amazing to take an egg in the shell to work, and then crack it into my lunch, all ready to go with a perfectly cooked yolk.  I'll post a few tips later this week, but in all truth, you can't really do better than Kenji's thorough guide over at Serious Eats.  

So, to be eligible to win this thoroughly un-Samin, and extraordinarily exciting, kitchen thingamabob, just post a photo, recipe, link, or anything else egg-related to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and use the #EggMonth hashtag.  I'll announce the winner on April 1st!

Good Luck!

Thanks to the amazingly generous and friendly people at Nomiku for their willingness to collaborate with a snotty naysayer.  Without them, this final giveaway would probably be an empty egg carton...I'm coming close to being egged out.

And the winner of last week's prize--the pasta machine and cookbooks from Ten Speed Press, is @thedaleyplate! Get in touch with me at ciao (at) saminnosrat (dot) com, and I will send you your prize! 

Recipe: Meringue Softies

Before I had a proper meringue, I had no idea why people went crazy for them.  Chalky, crumbly, dry, overly sweet....just inexplicable, really, why anyone would want to eat one, let alone look forward to it.

But then, I tasted the real thing.  Soft, pillowy, marshmallowy, delicious.  Meringues have also become one of my very favorite things to make, partly because they are extraordinarily simple.  Be careful, though--they are totally addictive.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup egg whites, at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons white vinegar or 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1 cup sugar
• Pinch of salt
• Optional: 1/2 cup chopped chocolate, toasted, chopped nuts, toasted coconut, or cocoa nibs

Preheat the oven to 200°F.   Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking liners.

To get the greatest volume, everything must be absolutely clean and free of fat.  So, even if your mixer bowl and whisk are clean, wash them again with soap and very hot water.  

Make sure that your egg whites are completely free of yolks, too.

Place the whites and vinegar or cream of tartar in the clean mixer bowl.  Set the bowl into the mixer, fit with the whisk attachment, and turn the mixer at a low speed.  While it can be tempting to crank up the speed, whipping the egg whites slowly creates smaller, more even-sized air bubbles, leading to a more stable meringue with greater volume.

Whip the egg whites until they are creamy and white, rather than transparent and yellow, and then increase the speed to medium and begin to add the sugar in a thin stream.  It should take a couple of minutes for you to add all of the sugar.  Add the salt.  Continue whisking until the whites hold stiff peaks.  

Remove the bowl from the mixer and carefully fold in any additions you're choosing to include.

Spoon 1-2 tablespoon amounts onto the lined baking sheet, leaving about 1/2-inch of space between each meringue, and bake for about 45-55 minutes, rotating the pans and changing their racks after 15 minutes.  Once the timer hits 35 minutes, check on the meringues every 5 minutes.  You'll know when they're done, but not overcooked, when you can easily peel one off the liner and pick it up without breaking (though sometimes if you use chocolate, it can cause a fully baked meringue to stick to the pan, so be aware).  

Let the meringues cool and gobble them up with friends.

If somehow, some are left, make sure to seal them up in an airtight container so they don't get soggalicious overnight.

Egg Month Giveaway: Pasta Machine, Mastering Pasta, & The Perfect Egg

I have a long history with fresh pasta.  I made pasta every single day for almost seven years.  I've made thousands of tortellini for parties with a thousand guests.  One time, I stood on an elaborately built platform at a party, sort of like a stage, and rolled pasta before guests while The Eagles and John Meyer performed a stone's throw away.  Another time, I went to China to make a few thousand tortellini at the American Embassy.  Chew on that--I went to China to make dumplings.  I'm still not over the irony of that one.

 And I still love making pasta.  Some might call me obsessed, and they'd be right.  There's something so magical about the way eggs and flour come together into dough that you can roll out into myriad shapes and sizes.  I don't think I'll ever stop being fascinated by pasta, and I'd like to share the wonder with you this week, so I'll be focusing on egg noodles in all of their glorious forms.     

This week's #Eggmonth giveaway is an Imperia pasta rolling machine--one of my own--and two beautiful new cookbooks from Ten Speed Press.  Looking at his new book, Mastering Pasta, it's obvious that Marc Vetri has a passion for pasta.  He has  spent over a decade making fresh pasta at his own restaurant, traveling to Italy, and studying with pasta masters and scholars, including my heroine, Oretta Zanini de Vita.  This book will take anyone with an interest in pasta deep into the nuances of the noodle.  

The second book, The Perfect Egg, is also just out this month, by authors Teri Lyn Fisher and Jenny Park.  A paean to the egg and its versatility, this book is beautifully shot and filled with a host of inspiring egg recipes from around the world, including okonomiyaki, tea-eggs, empanadas, egg custards, and marrow and eggs.   It'll get you jonesing to cook eggs, in case the rest of #eggmonth hasn't done much for you.

Thank you to Ten Speed Press, for contributing the cookbooks for this week's giveaway!

To be eligible to win this prize, simply post a photo, recipe, link, or anything else egg-related to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and use the #EggMonth hashtag.  I'll announce the winner next Monday when I reveal next week's giveaway.

Good Luck!

And the winner of last week's prize--the gift certificate to Good Eggs and a copy of Egg by Michael Ruhlman, is @seantimberlake.  Get in touch with me at ciao (at) saminnosrat (dot) com, and I will send you your prize! 

Recipe: Parsi Deviled Eggs

I didn't grow up eating deviled eggs, so I don't have a sense of nostalgia for any one particular version of them.  To be honest, I actually have to be in just the right mood to even want to eat them at all.  But the first time I had this version, from Niloufer Ichaporia King, I was a goner. As Patty Unterman first wrote in the SF Examiner, Niloufer found this recipe in a book published in Bombay in the 1940s, with the confounding title of "Italian Eggs."  The flavors, though, aren't Italian at all--they're much more reminiscent of India, Thailand, Vietnam or Mexico.  Make these, and soon they will be your preferred version of deviled eggs, too, no matter what you want to call them!

Ingredients

• 6 large eggs, hard-cooked
• Juice of 1-2 limes
• 1 teaspoon honey
• Salt 
• 1/2 jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced 
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• Cilantro leaves for garnish

Directions

Shell the eggs, cut them in half, and put the yolks in small bowl.  Set the egg whites aside.

Add all of the remaining ingredients, apart from the mayonnaise, to the yolks and mash with a fork until well combined.  Make sure the honey is well distributed.

Stir in the mayonnaise and taste.  Adjust lime and salt as needed.  

Spoon the mixture into the egg whites, cover, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.  

To serve, let the eggs return to room temperature and garnish with cilantro leaves.

Egg Month Giveaway: Gift Certificate to Good Eggs & EGG by Michael Ruhlman

There might not be anything capable of more kitchen miracles than that little, two-toned magician, the egg.  And there might not be anyone better suited to detail them all than author Michael Ruhlman.  

Michael Ruhlman is obsessed with eggs.  And he does them justice in his book, Egg, which began with a flowchart he made to obsessively organize all of the possibilities the egg offers us.  If you want to explore meringues, souffles, mayonnaise, hollandaise, custards, cakes, and everything in between, this is the book for you. 

The good folks at Good Eggs (who are so committed to supporting local farmers that they named their company in honor of the first farm--an egg farm--with which they developed a relationship) have also contributed a $25 gift certificate for me to give away to this week's winner.  If you haven't already checked out Good Eggs, do.  And if you don't know where else to buy humanely-raised eggs, start there!  

Thank you to Michael Szczerban at Little, Brown, and at Greta Caruso at Good Eggs, for contributing this week's #eggmonth prizes!

To be eligible to win this prize, simply post a photo, recipe, link, or anything else egg-related to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and use the #EggMonth hashtag.  I'll announce the winner next Monday when I reveal next week's giveaway.

Good Luck!

And the winner of last week's prize--the copper bowl and four cookbooks from Chronicle books--is @awmanny.  Get in touch with me at ciao (at) saminnosrat (dot) com, and I will send you your prize! 

Egg Month Giveaway: Vintage Copper Bowl & Cookbooks from Chronicle

The first Egg Month Giveaway comes from my own kitchen collection of copper bowls and whisks.  

Since the Chez Panisse kitchen is lined in copper from floor to ceiling, it was all but inevitable that I'd become obsessed with the rose-tinted metal myself.  I've been collecting vintage bowls, pots, measuring cups, and anything else I can get my hands on, for the past 15 years.  To the winner of this prize, I will send the copper bowl and whisk pictured above.

What does copper have to do with eggs?  Well, as Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking:

Long before anyone knew about egg proteins or chemical bonds, cooks had come up with a way of controlling them.  The French tradition has long specified the use of copper utensils for making egg foams.  One early trace of this tradition is a 1771 illustration in the French Encyclopédie that shows a boy in a pastry kitchen working with a straw whisk and what the accompanying key identifies as "a copper bowl for beating egg whites."....Sure enough, if you whip egg whites in a copper bowl...the foam stays glossy and never develops grains.

So, besides being extraordinarily beautiful, copper bowls also produce glossier, more gorgeous meringues and whipped egg whites.  

To top things off, the folks at Chronicle Books will send the winner four egg- and egg white-related cookbooks, all featuring that signature gorgeous Chronicle design.  

To be eligible to win this prize, simply post a photo, recipe, link, or anything else egg-related to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and use the #EggMonth hashtag.  I'll announce the winner next Monday when I reveal next week's giveaway.

Good Luck!

Egg Month!

Bean Month was such an unexpectedly wonderful success that I am declaring March #EggMonth!  And I'm challenging all of you omnivores out there to replace the meat in one dinner each week with eggs!

To help you on your way, I'll be posting recipes, articles, resources and all sorts of links, both here and on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, all tagged with the #EggMonth hashtag.  I encourage all of you to follow along and contribute with photos, posts, recipes, and resources of your own--I'll make an effort to share it all.

Plus, I have some INCREDIBLE giveaways lined up!  Every Monday, I'll announce a new giveaway for the week.  To be eligible to win, simply post an egg-related photo to Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and use the #EggMonth hashtag.  I'll choose a winner each Monday from among the previous week's contributors and get in touch so I can get you your prize.  

Good Luck, and Happy Egg Month!