One of my favorite meals to feed friends is brunch. No one expects a formal meal then, it’s easy to load the table and encourage family-style passing around food, and it’s such a free-form meal that almost anything is usable on the menu.
Not surprisingly, then, my cookbook collection has a fair number of morning food books. It’s fun to rummage through them, planning a menu like working a crossword puzzle. A new one crossed my desk a couple of months ago, called "Brunch" (Universe Publishing, $24.95). It’s by Marc Meyer and Peter Meehan, Meyer being one of the owners of Five Points, a New York restaurant I haven’t tried yet. So I tried a couple of recipes from it for my most recent set of guinea pigs.
I know you’re not supposed to make new recipes when company’s coming. But there are friends who are willing to cut me a little slack because of this sort of thing. I suppose it all depends on whom you’re cooking for—I’m not going to try this if Tim and Nina Zagat come to town and say they’re sick of restaurant food. (Joe and I do the Zagat Guide to St. Louis; www.zagat.com ; go visit, because there’s a St. Louis survey still open at this writing.)
I mostly like the book. It makes me want to run in the kitchen and start cooking, always a good sign. Some of it is strictly restaurant food—who makes potato chips at home for brunch? Other things are innovative things like banana bread with buckwheat flour. He offers frittatas (easy) baked eggs (interesting options and only slightly less easy) and poached eggs (also interesting options but trickier). Most of it is eminently doable by an adventurous cook with some experience. The experience part is important. The baked egg dishes call for a dozen eggs to serve four people, for instance, and a little thought produces the realization that hardly any group of four people eat three eggs plus fixings apiece. So keep an eye out for that sort of thing.
The biggest hit was these baked eggs over black beans. I made it vegetarian, and tossed in a little crisp bacon at the last minute on a whim; Meyer offers that as an option, but the basic version begins with bacon and uses chicken stock rather than water as a cooking liquid. I also used chipotle pepper for its smokiness since I hadn’t originally planned on the bacon, and that turned out to be a good idea.
Eggs Baked In Black Beans
1 pound black beans, rinsed and picked over
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 medium onion, peeled and diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 bay leaf
salt and freshly-ground pepper
3/4 tsp. chipotle pepper
1 tsp ground cumin
1 (6-oz.) can tomato paste
1 cinnamon stick
12 large eggs
1 c. shredded sharp Cheddar (about 1/4 lb.)
Soak the beans overnight, or at least 6 hours, in plenty of water. When ready to begin cooking the beans, heat the oil in a large saucepan, using medium-high heat. Add the carrot, onion and celery, drop the heat to medium and give the vegetables a stir to coat them in the oil. Cook until they soften and begin to lose volume, about 10 minutes.
Season them with black and chipotle peppers, cumin, tomato paste and cinnamon. Give the mixture another stir, cook for 2-3 minutes, until the cumin and cinnamon are fragarant. Add the beans, and enough water to cover by an inch or so. Bring the mixture to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until the beans are tender. Depending on the age of your beans, this could take from an hour to three hours; just keep checking it. When the beans are as soft as you like, and only then, add salt to taste.
At this point, you may cool the beans and refrigerate them until you’re ready to cook the eggs. Then they will need to be reheated.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and make sure one rack is set on the lowest level (not the floor of the oven, though). Lightly oil a 9×13-inch baking dish. Lightly drain the beans if necessary and pour into the baking dish. Use the back of a spoon or ladle to make 12 dents in the beans, and crack the eggs into these hollows. Salt and pepper each egg, scatter the cheese over all and set on the lowest shelf of the oven. Bake until the whites are just set but the yolks are still runny, 15-20 minutes. (It will take longer if the beans aren’t hot, be prepared.)
Serves 6, but as always, your mileage may vary.
Adapted from "Brunch".
I served this with a citrus cooler that could have had alcohol added to it but didn’t, two kinds of sausage, one from Swiss Meats, that fine supplier, and one from a fellow in Scott City, MO, who’s selling at the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market, a pasta cake from the book, some homemade oatmeal-molasses bread from my freezer, and a banana coconut loaf from an old Emeril Lagasse cookbook. The pasta cake, with cheese and spinach, was a little bland, and after letting the top brown per the book’s instructions turned out to be very hard to serve in neat slices. I’d try it again with more vigorous seasoning and an un-browned top, and let it completely cool to room temperature. They serve them at that temperature in Italy, and they’re delicious.