Cross Over The Bridge

Eggs. Pastured eggs. Organic eggs. Colorful pastel eggs. Eggs of several sizes and types. Even duck and turkey eggs. All right here in Point Richmond, up a little dead end street at the Garden Girl Farm. Who knew?

I've been crossing over the bridge for a long time, buying expensive, free range, organic eggs from the Woodlands Market whenever some other errand took me to Marin. They are worth the extra trouble and expense because I have the happy knowledge that the hens lead a more normal life and the eggs are simply delicious. Still, whenever the price of eggs is discussed I try to change the subject, somewhat shamefaced to be so spendthrifty and snooty about my eggs.

Then, last week at the Alley Cats monthly lunch (a gathering of the women on our little street), my neighbor announced that she had met the Garden Girl a few weeks ago and learned that we can purchase fresh eggs right here in Point Richmond. She gave me the contact info and I called right away.

The Garden Girl is the business name for Cassie Dingwall, the proprietor of Garden Girl Farm. She is a dead ringer for a young Mary Travers with super-straight blond hair, killer cheekbones and an athletic, slender frame; her vibe is energetic enthusiasm. Dressed in camo pants, a tee shirt and a baseball cap, she chatters freely about her organic farm and her dedication to it. She says that she and her husband, Scott, haven't gone anywhere in seven years because it's not easy to find someone to care for the rabbits, chickens, ducks and turkeys.

The front yard is a well tended vegetable garden, decorated with a somewhat macabre statue of a vulture, where a flock of baby chicks peck and her cats slink in and out as we get to know each other over egg selection. The back yard contains the bulk of the farm, an area I didn't have time to tour on my first visit, but I will be back.

I selected my dozen eggs from a picturesque basket of multi-hued offerings that were laid that very day by the flock of perhaps 30 hens she keeps on the farm. Blue, green, cream, brown in all sizes from slightly larger than a walnut to jumbo duck eggs perfect for baking. I love the variety of colors and sizes - they don't affect the flavor but the visual surprise every time I open the carton is a simple pleasure.

Needless to say, I'm tickled to find the Garden Girl. Not only do I save the $4 bridge toll, I also save $2 on a dozen eggs; Cassie currently charges $5. If you're over this way, I'd encourage you to call her and make arrangements for a pickup. You might even want to bring home a pet rabbit or some chicken or rabbit poo for your garden, both of which she also sells. Or, you can purchase purebred Royal Palm turkeys, if you have a notion to raise your own Thanksgiving dinner or just have a more unusual pet. Not to mention landscaping services. As I said, her vibe is dynamic.

I'm not crossing over the bridge for eggs any more. More and more, I'm finding everything I need right here. Too bad we can't grow coffee beans or pineapples here, or.... can we?

It's All Her Fault

When we were growing up, my sister and I didn't always get along. No, that's not correct - we never got along. We were forever pointing fingers at each other and claiming, "It's her fault!"

Now that I'm slightly more adult, at least in years if not in behavior, I'm still pointing fingers. This time at J-in-Wales, who commented on Cookiecrumb's post of long ago, that she should put a dippy egg into her chip butty.

Dippy egg! And me with a box full of pastured eggs in the fridge!

I couldn't get to my toaster fast enough, to toast more of that wonderful bread, sizzle another slice of the killer Canadian bacon and gently fry one of those eggs in the same pan. I prepped the toast with a light scrape of mayo, assembled and took that first unbelievable bite.

OMG.

O.M.G.

OMG!

If my sister and I had had something like this to eat, peace might have reigned in our home. Even if it always was her fault.

Eggselent

I cracked open three eggs this morning to make an omelet and literally exclaimed when I saw the difference.

The yolk on the right was the last from my dozen of organic, cage-free, local eggs supplied by a large company in our area. Obviously, they do their best to produce fresh eggs from hens who are given as good a life as large production allows.

The two eggs on the left are from pastured hens who live on another organic farm out to the west of us, also local but very small, Clark Summit Farm in Tomales, CA. Their hens run around all day in the pasture eating whatever yummies they find - bugs, worms and grass - and are offered organic feed and crushed oyster shells to strengthen the eggs' shells. They are sheltered at night in moveable coops for their safety. They are not kept under lights to increase their laying but are allowed to rest during the dark months.

All this produces lovely orange yolks but, color aside, it just feels better to me to know that my eggs come from chickens who live a good chicken life while laying me some lovely eggs. To me, it's worth the $4 trip across the bridge and the higher price to know the care that has gone into producing these delicious eggs.

Pre-Wedding Checkup

My Beloved's younger daughter is getting married. She found a delightful man and they are planning a July wedding. Her mother called me the other day to ask if I wanted to co-host a wedding-day brunch for Katie and all the women who are coming from afar for the wedding; of course, I jumped at the chance to honor Katie - she's a pretty special young woman in my life.

We talked about a couple of places where we might hold such a brunch; one of them was Camino on Grand Avenue in Oakland, a place we had never been, so My Beloved and I were eager to check it out. It turned out that Katie wanted to treat us to brunch to celebrate my last birthday, too, so we all agreed to meet at Camino. We drank a glass of their carefully ground and brewed coffee while we caught up with all the wedding progress so far. Always a delight to have the bride-to-be all to ourselves!

Here's my brunch choice, a wood oven-baked egg with herbs and cream. The color on your monitor does not need adjusting - the yolk really was that rich an orange - and the flavor matched the color for deep, eggy richness. I was glad I ordered a single - two might have been too much. The egg was baked with about a tablespoon of cream plus minced green onion, fresh parsley and perhaps fresh tarragon? I'm not sure but, whatever they were, the flavors worked well together. The cream was just enough but not too much, and the egg was perfectly cooked with a firm white but liquid yolk. I used their homemade bread to soak up all the flavorful cream-and-herb goodness.

It was so good that it dispelled my horror of baked eggs, acquired when I was at boarding school in the south of France and was served baked eggs à la cockroach one scary spring day. When I protested, the school chef gave me an impressive Gallic shrug and proclaimed, "Tant pis! C'est la saison!" (Too bad. 'Tis the season). Needless to say, my enthusiasm for baked eggs waned dramatically from that day to this. Still, feeling fairly certain that Camino would never serve eggs with insects, I took a chance and was amply rewarded for my fortitude.

Katie had rabbit ragout topped with a poached egg and My Beloved went for the French toast with fruit compote - we were all happy with our choices. Clearly, this place checked out well as a setting for a pre-wedding brunch.

The Admiral's Daughter's Breakfast

My Dad was a naval officer. He was also the son of a naval officer, brother of two naval officers (one male, one female), father, uncle and great-uncle of naval officers. Our family has sea water in our veins. When my Dad was chosen for the rank of admiral, however, both his daughters wailed, "But, Daddy, we don't want to be admiral's daughters!"

You see, in the Navy, admiral's children are known to be smarmy little brats, spoiled from birth and impossible to like. All our lives, as we rode the bus to school, the various admiral's kids were recognized and reviled. My mother recalls me coming home from school one day to complain with 7 year old scorn about one admiral's son, "Felix Stump is the baddest boy on the bus!" We foresaw similar opinions about ourselves.

Too badski, he chose to accept the rank over our vociferous protests, and along with it came a new member of our family, a steward. His name is Benjamin Banks. He had joined the Navy as a very young man - when we first knew him, he couldn't have been more than 19 or 20 years old. Stewards in the Navy are cooks; my mother was in heaven! Once she taught him how to make her favorite recipes, she sat back and enjoyed every minute of not having to cook for our family of ravenous appetites.

He invented my favorite form of scrambled eggs, which he called "smashed eggs," and would make them for me almost every morning, back before eggs and bacon were considered dangerous substances. Simplicity itself, smashed eggs are softly scrambled with little bits of crispy bacon thrown in during the cooking. There is something about the salty, smoky bits enrobed in moist egg that simply can't be beat - the whole is even better than its excellent parts. If I have any leftover bacon, I'm very likely to make smashed eggs with it. Sadly, Chief Banks lives in Richmond, Virginia rather than Richmond, California, so he's not here to make it for me as he did for so many mornings, back when I was a spoiled brat of an admiral's daughter.

Egg Roll

I seem to be on a roll with egg dishes these days, notably eggs plopped on top of things.

Having made this huge pot of beans (did you know that a single pound of beans will feed a small army?) while My Beloved was away on business, I wanted him to taste them on his first night home. He's not a huge beans-and-franks fan and the beans already had ham in them, anyway, so I was at somewhat of a loss as to how to dress up the dish.

Inspiration! What about a pair of poached eggs with golden, runny centers atop all that brownish-red goodness? It had worked like a charm with the butternut hash, so why not?

He inhaled it. He scraped up the last lingering slurp of sauce. He looked around for more.

I'm on a roll, an egg roll.

I Made a Hash of It

Home from Boston and Connecticut after a seemingly endless flight, a smooth connection to BART and the world's gentlest taxi driver, I peeked into the fridge to find out what, if anything, had survived our ten-day absence. The cold cuts - definitely not! Into the trash! We did have three shallots, half a red onion, garlic and the stub of a butternut squash, plus whole wheat bread and eggs so I decided to play around with those and the Swiss chard leaves I found still thriving in the garden.

I made a hash of it.

I chopped the red onion coarsely, peeled and halved the shallots, minced the garlic and cooked those in a combination of olive oil and butter, adding the diced squash and cooking the whole mess for about 20 minutes, until the squash softened and browned a little. When the squash was just tender, I added the chard leaves, leaving the small ones whole and coarsely chopping the larger ones, popped on a lid and steamed the chard while the eggs were poaching and the toast was toasting.

The result was one of the best dinners I have made, the sweet onions and squash complementing the slightly bitter greens with the eggs adding their richness to the whole dish. I'm making it again tonight and this time I'll add some fresh thyme* from the garden and some black pepper but even plain it made a great accompaniment to hashing over our East Coast visit.

*Note: the thyme made all the difference - it lifted the dish from yummy to eye-rolling delicious. Don't forget the thyme!

Spudless Hash

Leftover lunch. The RoastHaus' leftover corned beef diced, sauteed with a little chopped onion and scrambled with a couple of eggs and a sprinkling of dill weed. Nothin' fancy, and sometimes that's the best.

Shirred Eggs with Style

A recent Sunset magazine article featured eggs baked in hollowed pattypan squash, an idea with appeal. Theirs looked like the yellow one in the picture; I also wanted to try a globe zucchini just for fun, changing the recipe a bit to suit my own tastes.

All you do is cut the bottom off the squash to make a stable (and edible) base, then slice off the top and scoop out the insides, leaving a thin 1/4" shell. The squashes are then brushed with olive oil and baked alongside their tops for about 15 minutes in a 375 degree oven until they are fork tender but still hold their shape. So far, so good - but this is where I diverged.

Rather than using sauteed onion and garlic as Sunset recommended, I used some roasted shallot I had left over and fresh, minced thyme from my garden. You just need a little of the filling, unless you are making these for a crowd, perhaps a tablespoon for each squash. Then, you crack an egg into each veggie ramekin (if some of the white runs down the side, just gently wipe it off or lift out the extra so it doesn't cook on the squash and spoil the symmetry of the finished dish) and put them back into the oven for about 15-20 minutes, depending on how firm you like your egg. You can spoon a little milk on top to keep the egg from drying out.

Having baked both in the same pan, I'd probably recommend that you separate the pattypans from the zucchinis another time - the pattypan, being smaller, cooked faster than the zucchini. If I was making the two again, I'd start the zucchini ones about 3-5 minutes before the pattypans.

I liked many things about this dish - the delicate texture of the eggs, the delicious surprise of the savory shallot underneath, the combination with the squash and the flavor of thyme. The only thing it lacked was something to add just a little richness and texture, the way buttered toast enhances poached eggs. Another time, I might serve it with toasted, buttered and garlic-rubbed baguette slices or perhaps on a bed of wilted spinach and drizzled with some hollandaise sauce. Alternatively, you could add some chopped ham or smoked salmon to the onion mixture.

Any way you serve them, these are definitely baked eggs with style.

Oeufs Lausannais?

Winding down from a busy and fun week with My Beloved's boss in town overlapping with a visit from our friends Ted and Jan from St. Louis, I was looking for an easy and healthful dinner for a very tired MB. I had mistakenly bought too many eggs, so that seemed like a good choice. But, how to present them?

As you may know, my veggie garden has been less than productive but, while the zucchini and greenie beanies have been having hissy fits and refusing to produce, my Swiss chard has been, without fanfare or sulking, quietly giving us a weekly pan full of green goodness - and it was time for a harvest again.

I made a chiffonade of the leaves and stems and butter steamed them lightly, then mounded the fresh green strips on a toasted English muffin half, topped them with a poached egg,and slathered the egg with a small dollop of a sauce made by adding just a little mayonaise to a nice dollop of Dijon mustard.

MB was reinvigorated.

Now, what do you call this concoction? Eggs Florentine refers to spinach under eggs but is there a name specifying Swiss chard under eggs with Dijon mustard? I looked up the city in Switzerland closest to Dijon in France - well, it's really Bern but we already have Bearnaise sauce so it seemed a little confusing and Lausanne is the next largest well-known city close to the French border. Oeufs Lausannais? What do you think? Will it fly?

These oeufs by any other name are still delicious.

Waiting For The Repairman...

I had to be home for a four-hour window in which the dishwasher repairman was coming to look at our aging and ailing dishwasher. Secretly hoping that this one is past repair so I can justify the purchase of a new one that actually washes dishes and that doesn't immediately negate the possibility of conversation once it starts, still I felt compelled to see if the old one could be returned to useful service for the relatively minor cost of repair vs. replacement.

Whiling away the hours, I found in the fridge this dollop of egg salad left over from my lunch with Cookiecrumb and Moonbear, the perfect mid-day snack to interrupt the boredom. Turns out it's a good thing to invite food bloggers to lunch - they bring wonderful munchies along with them!

Moonbear's backyard hens produced the makings for this lovely salad from eggs so fresh that they had to be scooped out of their shells rather than peeled. That's a fascinating fact that I learned while Moonbear was mixing up the egg salad in my kitchen. Cookiecrumb brought a wonderful salad, too, which I'm hoping she will post about as it was beautiful as well as tasty. All I did was stand back, point out where the kitchen implements were, and sit down to a delicious lunch with them!

And, the next day, to another lovely meal. My hat's off to the hens! Now, if that dratted repairman would just come...

She's a Dilly!

Our friend Sari is a dilly! That's an antiquated expression meaning that she's cool. Even though we are old enough to be her parents, she treats us like equals and even accompanied us to Paris with every indication that she actually enjoyed palling around with a couple of fogies.

She has all kinds of stellar qualities such as snapping intelligence, humor, deep kindness and humanity - and she makes great scrambled eggs. On a recent Sunday, we invited her to brunch; we provided the bacon and toast but we asked her to cook the eggs.

She puts a dollop of milk or cream into the eggs, then beats them with a fork until they are homogeneous, adding just a touch of dill weed to the mixture. She has the patience to cook the eggs in a generously buttered pan on very, very low heat and keeps vigorously stirring them all the time they are cooking. The result is pillow-soft, dainty curds that melt richly on the tongue, leaving that hint of dill behind. Served with a piece of Acme Pain au Levain, they make a dilly brunch.