Lazy #2

In my last post I mentioned how bored I’d gotten with the egg.  However, after a week off from eggs, I couldn’t resist buying a bag of them.  Here in Ukraine one buys a plastic bag with 10 eggs in it instead of a carton with 12.  They are almost always brown and still have chicken crap on them.  I like to get mine from the ladies at the market because each one of them sells eggs from a particular nearby village.  The name of the village is usually prominently displayed next to the price.  This allows the buyer to know what they are buying in a more intimate way and to figure out which villages produce the best eggs.  One of the things I love about eggs is the tens of thousands of things one can do with them.  In particular is one of my stand-by lazy dinners.  I guess it is a form of tortilla or frittata, but I can never flip the damn thing without it falling apart, so I tend to just finish it in the oven.

Getting more for my money

I eat a lot, and an important part of my cooking is finding inexpensive sources of good quality protein. As much as I would love to eat steak all the time, I simply can’t afford it. Also, if we look at the traditional diets of people around the world, meat is a luxury item that shows up perhaps only on Sunday nights. My usual source of cheap, quality protein is the egg, but after making omelettes, frittate, tortillas, over-easy, Benedict, and scrambled one hundred times apiece, I grew tired of the egg. Going back to looking at traditional cuisines (especially in Italy where people were often dirt poor) I found beans. Beans are a great source of protein, are filling, and are so cheap, they’re almost free. The problem is that they’re bland. However, they can be surrounded by flavorful ingredients; from hummus where garlic, lemon, olive oil, and tahini mask the blandness of chickpeas to the barbecue sauce and pork flavored versions I’ve eaten at countless cookouts, cuisine has a way of squeezing the beans into our diet to make the meat last longer. Tonight I made something between fagioli all’uccelletto and cassoulet with my own twists to boot.

Steak-Frites

I got up this morning and went to the market to get some beef. I fully expected to find some chuck (here it’s simply called neck) or another stewing/braising cut. However, when I arrived my beef lady insisted I buy another cut. The meat is cut very strangely here, but based on the look and feel of the meat and her insistence that it was soft I decided that it was either sirloin or, at worst, top round. I bought it and took it home. As I walked home, I tried to decide what to do with it. I had some good potatoes at home, and I was really looking forward to having a nice steak; so I decided to make the Belgian classic Steak-Frites. I could have left it at that, but I decided to go another step (I was having company to help me eat), instead of making simple Steak-Frites like the one I ate in Brussels at the beginning of a night that would lead to one of the worst hangovers of my life, I made Steak Au Poivre (pepper steak) with a rich, brandy-flavored cream sauce, steak fries, and roasted Brussels sprouts.