Saturday, November 20, 2010

Jamie: omg

there's more than one crouton for every
asparagus spear 
I was very excited to make this week's recipe: I love asparagus, I love poached eggs (I've been poaching 'em like a fiend lately), I love most forms of cured meats... and croutons are good, too. I thought of making this for brunch Saturday morning, but settled on having it for dinner instead (out of laziness, basically).

I haven't made croutons before, and I was a little cautious having read Veronica and Jo's accounts. But it's only some, oil and garlic, and I'm of the Julia Child school when it comes to butter, so there couldn't be anything to be afraid of, right? The bread did soak up all of the oil and butter pretty quickly.... so I was hoping that the longer I let it fry the less oily it would be. 

The instruction to put parchment paper down in a sheet pan before coating the asparagus spears in oil was a good one - no mess! I used plain old olive oil and some lemon-infused oil to jazz up the asparagus a little, and the usual salt and pepper. Once the asparagus was on the stove, I got to poaching the eggs. I'm getting pretty good at it again. A few years ago I researched the best way to do it and kept practicing (oh living in a foreign country with no money)... but until recently I had forgotten how to poach eggs, though I've yet to master poaching two eggs at a time. I'm also not that finicky about how they look at the end: I'm not about trim off excess bits of yolk. Egg number one poached well (and when flipped over, looked pretty good). Egg number two somehow broke while in the pot.

I can't believe I ate the whole thing.
I think next time I make this, I'll skip the croutons. It could be that I made too many for one meal, or used too much oil or butter, but right now I feel so full and ... ugh. I mean, I probably ate two servings' worth of everything, so that may be the problem,  but I'm going to ignore that for now and blame the croutons. Before I made this, I was considering grating parmesan over everything, and I must say I'm glad I didn't. It would have been too much. 

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