There were plenty of street pizzas delivered on street corners and parked cars last night, I’m sure.

One merry-making dude came up to me and  deposited a shamrock sticker on my wrist, which I took to mean he thought I was young enough to be a co-ed.

These Irish eyes were a’smiling, though I’m not Irish.

(Or he just felt sorry for me, all bundled up in my Patagonia fleece and woolen scarf, black nurse clogs weighing me down like foot coffins.)

So I got to thinking: Jake and I are abysmal when it comes to acknowledging these peripheral holidays — or most holidays, really —  and I thought it would be nice to surprise him by making green eggs and ham filet mignon for dinner. I’ve got the filet mignon (I found it, frozen, lurking in the depths of my freezer — “waste not, want not,” my motto!), but I had some trouble figuring out how to make green eggs without resorting to green food coloring.

Until I came up with this clever little strategy:

Crack as many eggs as you feel like eating, separating the whites from the yolks.

Whisk the whites and a couple spoonfuls of pesto together until the whites turn appropriately green.

Gently pour the whites (turned green) into a preheated skillet and cook over low heat. You want to give the eggs as much of a fried egg appearance as possible, not an omelet. You may even want to use a round cookie cutter to hold the eggy shape.

After the whites have cooked through, remove them from the skillet. Set aside. Gently add the yolks one by one. I found that picking them up with my fingers was the way to go. Cook to your desired set. (Check out how healthy and robust these yolks are. THIS is why we raise chickens.)

I don’t care for runny yolks, so I cooked mine a minute longer than I cooked Jake’s.

Cut the heat. Transfer the “whites” to a plate and top with the cooked yolks.

Okay, so the whites could have been greener and I think I cooked the yolks too long, but…..it was exceptionally tasty!  I’d put it right up there with a body shot of Jagermeister anyday.

Just because I haven’t been in the mood to eat eggs doesn’t mean I don’t want to rock with them.

Our awesome neighbor Yvonne brought us some of her homemade chorizo the other night because it turned out to be too spicy for her family’s palate.  She knows Jake and I practically eat habaneros with our Walmart Honey Nut Spins in the morning, so she pawned it off on us.

So we did what we always do: I sat back and watched Jake work. He whipped up a batch of his amazing homemade biscuits — which I swear he can make in  5 minutes flat — some perfectly round mini omelets, using day-fresh eggs, and delightfully spicy chorizo patties.

It was all wonderfully heavy and spicy and delicious going down. I swear the insides of my legs are gaining more weight than my pregnant belly! But it’s worth it. I think.  (Though I will sing a different song come summer, I’m sure.)  Yvonne’s chorizo tasted a lot more authentic (read: spicy) than the version I posted about a few days ago.

Yvonne, where did you get the recipe? I’ll trade mine for yours. Then I’ll post about it for readers who like their homemade chorizo HOT.

And my eggs-periment has been on a death march ever since.

Pregnancy in and of itself is not much of an excuse for abandoning my ovum ambitions. Eggs are supposedly a “perfect protein” and are really good for developing babies; they make their brains really huge or something. It’s just that, well, I found that eating an egg a day in a new, original, crazy interpretation whilst with child didn’t exactly spark my appetite. It was a huge turn-off, actually. I came to dread my daily dose of yolk.

As a pregnant lady, I find that I only want to eat what I want when I want it.  No exceptions.

So I hope you’ll pardon the egg hiatus. I’m not abandoning the project altogether. I’m just whittling it down–drastically–to about once or twice a week or so.  Not as dramatic as the one-a-day thing, but it’s all I can handle.

For the next five months, I gotta go where my appetite takes me. And right now, it’s calling out for a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie and a piece of venison jerky. Gotta go.

When it’s cold outside, my mind turns to boredom. Then baking. Then baked concoctions fit for a 5-year old. I swear, mine is the most unsophisticated palate when it comes to dessert — peanut butter and jelly cupcakes. Can it get more Sesame Street?

First, line two muffin tins with paper holders. Set the oven to 350 degrees.

2. In a large bowl, sift together 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder and 1/2 tsp. salt.

3. In a separate large bowl, cream together 1 stick softened unsalted butter, 1 cup sugar and 1 tsp. vanilla extract. Add 2 eggs, one at a time, beating well with an electric mixer, then add 1/2 cup whole milk.

4. Slowly add the flour mixture and combine until the batter is uniform. Do not overmix.

5. Fill each cupcake liner halfway with batter. It’s important not to overfill. (You’ll see why a few photos down.)

6. Drop slightly less than a full tablespoon of jam in the center of each cupcake. I used homemade grape jelly I made last summer. It sure is a treat to open a jar of tart, bright summer-y preserves when it looks like this outside:

Back to those cupcakes:

I put in a little too much jelly. Which is why I recommend using not quite a tablespoon in each.

7. Top with more batter so that they are a little more than three-quarters full. As you can see, mine are a little too full.

8. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out cake free (you may see some jam), or until the cupcakes spring back when touched slightly. Ideally, you want your cupcakes to look like what you see above once they come out of the oven. But…

….if you filled them too much, as I did with some of mine, the jam spills over onto the tin and sticks like cement…..

….making removing them from the tin a messy, sticky business. It’s better if your tray of baked muffins comes out looking like this:

(save for that one jammy splotch.)

9. Next up, whip up some crazy delicious PEANUT BUTTER FROSTING: Beat 1 1/4 sticks of unsalted softened butter and a huge spoonful of creamy peanut butter in an electric mixer. Add 2 1/2 cups powdered sugar, 1/4 tsp. salt and then 3 tablespoons of whole milk. Add more milk or sugar to loosen or tighten the icing, respectively.

This makes too much frosting for 12 cupcakes, but given that my husband eats peanut butter and Duncan Hines cream cheese frosting sandwiches for lunch, I don’t think he’ll mind.

ENJOY!

My Internet has been down all week, hence spotty posting, and the thought of eating a lot of eggs while pregs has been making me way queasy. But I shan’t give up! I’m an egg masochist!

Though I’ve had to stay away from ultra-rich, fatty, creamy egg recipes in favor of lighter fare.  Which is why a recipe like Eggs Beatrice is tolerable right now.

Eggs Beatrice is considered the light version of Eggs Benedict. It calls for grilled tomato slices over Canadian bacon and a vinegar shallot reduction instead of creamy, fattening Hollandaise sauce.

Eggs Beatrice for two:

Grill or pan fry two oiled, seasoned tomato slices, a minute per side. Place the slices on the cut halves of two warm biscuits or English muffins. Using the same pan, melt a little butter and fry two eggs sunny side up over low heat. Cover the pan while they cook. Remove the eggs from the pan and place them on top of the tomato slices. Next, add a tablespoon of butter to the pan, increase the heat to high, and add 2-4 tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Cook until the liquid reduces somewhat, then throw in a handful of minced shallots or chives and whatever other herbs you have lying around. Cook until the herbs soften then drizzle the liquid over the top of the two eggs. Season with salt and pepper. Cover with the other half of the cut biscuit/muffin and EAT UP!

Whenever I think of huevos rancheros, I think of Austin. Austinians drink beer with their huevos rancheros.  I like people who drink beer with breakfast.

There are all kinds of complicated recipes for huevos rancheros, which is why I never made them before last night. This is what happens when you have 8 cartons of eggs in your refrigerator at all times — you end up never going grocery shopping and end up eating eggs morning, noon and night. It’s pretty disgusting, really.)

I didn’t feel like following some fancy-pants recipe, so we ended up putting together our own version of whatever ingredients we had lying around. Think of this as the Rachael Ray approach to making huevos rancheros:

The fundamentals:

• corn tortillas

• fried eggs

• black or refried beans

• salsa

• queso fresco

To make, we first pan fried the tortillas in a little hot oil for 3 seconds each side, then warmed them in an oven set to 200 degrees. Meanwhile, we heated a can of beans in a sauce pan, and gussied it up with all sorts of seasonings — oregano, s&p, a little chile powder. Next, we fried four eggs, and served two eggs each atop one warmed tortilla. Add a large spoonful of beans to the eggs, drizzle with lots of hot salsa and top with crumbled queso fresco, chopped cilantro and scallions. Hearty, hot, eggy and delicious. And no stinking “EVOO.”

Today I give you: Eggs McBiscuit, the perfect Sunday feast.

My husband is obsessed with baking biscuits. I don’t know why. I think he thinks they epitomize southern cooking. Master them, master southern cooking. I’m no expert on such matters, but I think he has finally mastered them.

Look at these things! They’re perfect. Light, flaky, fluffy. As Jake says, it’s “fried-chicken ready.” Meaning, it’s substantial enough to eat with a piece of southern fried chicken. How much more southern can you get? (One of these days I’m going to try my hand at fried chicken.)

Jake has this thing about wanting the egg to fit perfectly between each half of the biscuit — like they do at McDonalds — so he tried frying the egg in a cookie cutter to give it a nice “round” shape.

This cookie cutter used to be a star before Jake manhandled it into a circle. Looks more like a stop sign to me.

As you can see, the frying egg seeped through the bottom of the cookie cutter. He then tried using a metal canning band, but seepage still occurred.

But no matter. Neither of us minded a little eggy spillover. (Or, I didn’t, anyway) The eggs on a biscuit were DELICIOUS. He also added a piece of colby cheese and a smear of Dijon mustard. Is there a better way to kick-off your Sunday?

A lot of commerical ice cream makers such as Ben & Jerry, etc., use stabilizers like guar gum to give their products a more toothsome, almost chewy texture. I have nothing against gums, per se, I just don’t want to, like, go out and buy any.

We make a lot of ice cream in this house, using just the basics: whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, a drop of vanilla bean. That’s it. It’s simple. It’s perfection. It tastes bright and clean and wholesome. (Like us! We’re vanilla!) And yet, despite my purist sensibilities, I kind of missed the chewiness of commercial creams, that feeling of taking a bite of ice cream as opposed to an airy lick.

Enter the egg. We’ve found that adding a raw egg right before processing makes the liquids and fat in the milk and cream more miscible. It gives the ice cream a denser structure by allowing it to whip more thoroughly, which gives the cream greater resistance to melting.

We like to think of the almighty egg as the original guar gum.

Some people have issues eating raw eggs. I don’t have those issues. And we have noticed a huge difference in the texture of ice cream finished with an egg versus that without: it’s silkier, smoother, denser. Mmmm.

Try this recipe, and you may wonder why you ever bothered with Chunky Monkey

HOMEMADE VANILLA ICE CREAM WITH EGG YOLK

- Whisk 3/4 cup granulated sugar with 1 cup whole milk until the sugar is dissolved, about 1 to 2 minutes.

- Add 2 cups heavy whipping cream (Note: Using high quality cream makes a big difference in the outcome of the ice cream. Subpar, less dense whipping cream makes the finished product too watery, causing it to crystallize in the freezer more quickly.)

- Add a tiny bit of crushed vanilla bean or a teensy splash of pure vanilla extract

- Add two to three egg yolks

- Whisk everything together to make sure the yolk is well blended, pour the contents into a pre-frozen bucket of an ice cream maker and process for 25 to 30 minutes.

- Transfer ice-cream to a freezer safe container. Freeze for 4 to 24 hours to give the ice cream time to set.

One more thing: No need to invest in an expensive ice cream maker, unless you plan to make ice cream professionally or in bulk. We have found this ice cream maker works wonders, and it only cost $50. For what it’s worth, it came highly recommended by the food snobs at Cook’s Illustrated.