Bagel Pizzas with Fresh Mozzarella and BBQ Sauce

Nothing incredibly original or stretching my skills here, but a good, quick snack nonetheless.

Luckily, I have a couple of good bagel stores in walking distance to get fresh bagels. (No pre-packaged, mini-bagels here!) And I can also get a fresh mozzarella, with or without salt. (We prefer without -- you can always add it if you need to.)

I didn't have any pizza sauce or leftover sauce from pasta, and I wasn't going to open a can of tomato sauce, figure out what spices I needed, for just two bagel halves. Next best thing, there was a bottle of BBQ sauce in the fridge from Dinosaur BBQ. A little on the spicy side, but that's a plus.

Cut open the bagel. Make a circular depression with your thumb going around the bagel. Put the bagel in the toaster oven and toast it for about half the time you normally would.

Spoon in BBQ sauce into the depression and spread it around. (Don't fill it like a trough.)

Cut up the mozzarella. Here's one time where the packaged stuff, particularly string cheese, might have been better. The fresh kind is a little watery, especially if you refrigerate it in water after you buy and use it the first time. I tried to dry the slice a little with paper towels. It worked a little.

Sprinkle some spices on top: garlic powder, onion powder, pepper, salt, whatever. Pop it back into the toaster oven and cook it some more. Watch that the cheese isn't burning ... or dripping all over the inside of the oven.

Comfort Food: the Double-Decker Fried Egg Sandwich with Cheese

It doesn't take a genius to make comfort food. The genius comes in knowing when you need to make it. And knowing how to improve upon it.

One of the first things I learned how to cook was a scrambled egg (although it often came out somewhere between scrambled and a mini-omelet). Unfortunately, I didn't always have the patience (or, frankly, the ability) to properly scramble an egg. So I had a lot of fried eggs.

Fried eggs are just plopped into the flying pan after the butter has melted.
You don't have to flip a fried egg, and it isn't uncommon for certain eight-year-olds to break the yolk making attempts to flip fried eggs and then whining and crying about it.

My mother used to tilt the pan and spoon some of the grease onto the top of the egg to cook it. That was difficult for me because the pan was hot, even with the pot holder, so I just covered it with a pot lid, and it would cook just fine.

The moment of brilliance comes when you realize that if you're making toast, and you decide to make a sandwich out of it, it doesn't matter if the yolk breaks. In fact, you want it to break. That actually gave me the courage to practice flipping my eggs.

So how do you improve on the simplicity of one egg, one frying pan and two pieces of toast, which bring back childhood memories?

Well, yeah, a bagel or a roll or something. Sure.

But how about two eggs?

One egg isn't very filling, but two eggs is too much for most rolls or bagels. Not that I mind having stuff hanging over the sides, but I don't like burning my fingers while I'm eating breakfast.

And then the brilliance struck.
This was recent. I would never have had the patience for this as a kid.

A double-decker fried egg sandwich.
Make two eggs, but make them one at a time. The first egg won't have time to get cold, and you'll be putting a second hot egg right on top of it.

Can you improve that?
How about a slice of cheese in between. (I use the slices from the bricks at Costco.)

There wasn't any ham in the fridge this morning, but I did have a little package of mini Canadian bacon. I heated it up for a few minutes in the pan to top it off.

And a slice of tomato that was almost as wide as the bagel.

Sorry, no pictures. It was a little sloppy when put together.
And by the time I thought to take a picture, there was a big ol' bite taking out of it.

Comforting.

Baking Breakfast on the Grill

Sunday morning I decided to cook my breakfast outdoors. It was a last-minute idea, so I had to raid the fridge for ingredients.

Years ago, I had a recipe that I used with the kids on Mothers Day morning, which was basically a couple slices of bread, the top slice with a hole cut out, and an egg was dropped in. Then it was put into the oven to bake for a while. Unfortunately, I have to find that recipe because I don't remember the temperature or the amount of time and I'm not experimenting.

Anyway, it was too hot to use the oven, and I was too lazy to empty it of all the trays and pans (and restock them later). So I went to the grill and used my trusty cast-iron pan.

Ingredients: one oversized bagel with almost no hole to speak of,
one egg,
butter,
shredded cheddar cheese,
jalapenos (one of my go to items, keep a jar in the fridge for the summer)

What I didn't add, but should have:
bacon -- none in the house, and I would've had to clean up
salsa -- didn't think of it, and I couldn't use very much anyway.
ham -- there was a slice in the fridge, but I didn't notice it
salt -- this I just forget. When the ham or bacon, it isn't necessary. I added it later, but it wasn't the same.

Procedure
Preheat the grill. When it's hot turn off the middle burner.
Put the pan on the middle burner. Add a little butter.
Carefully, cut a cone-shaped hole in the middle of the top of the bagel into the center. After that you can make it a cup-shaped hole.
If you can see out the bottom of the bagel, stuff some bread into the hole and press it down.
(If the bagel had any appreciable hole whatsoever, you can't do this. Get a nice-sized roll, or use two slices of bread.)

Put the bagel in the pan. Drop some butter into the top of the bagel.
Slice up a couple pieces of jalapenos and drop it in.
Crack an egg and plop it in. It's up to you whether you want to scramble it first, or just drop it in, or to crack the yolk afterward.
Cover with shredded cheese.

I let it bake on the center burner with the other two on high for 10-15 minutes.
Just to be sure, at the end, I put the center burner on low for about 3 minutes, to make sure the egg was cooked.

Results
I enjoyed this, but it could've used salt.
Also, I should have gotten out a little earlier so I wouldn't have had the sun right on my back as I was cooking. If I do this again, get an earlier start.

Live and learn. But that's the point of this blog.

Two Egg Omelettes on a Bagel, No Hyphen

I didn't have a two-egg omelette on a bagel. I had two omelettes on a bagel.

Yes, I eat a lot of bagels, especially when I bought one dozen fresh and they didn't get eaten last weekend, so I had to freeze them. Sue me.

Anyway, not in the mood for cheese, which usually works well, because it covers the hole, but I was in the mood for salsa (like Frank, from "Everybody Loves Raymond"), which could make a mess.

Here's how I handled it. Toasted a bagel. Scrambled one egg. Buttered the bagel. Put the one cooked egg on the hot bagel to keep warm. Poured a second egg into the pan. Spooned the salsa on the first egg. Finished cooking the second. Put in on top of the salsa. Voila! Salsa sandwich with the egg as bread. Well, not exactly. That was inside a toasted bagel.

Nice. And it didn't squirt salsa all over, either.

Eggless McMuffin-ish

I've had this idea for a comic strip, which I'd use if I get stuck and can't come up with something more geeky to do. The woman confronts the man, upset because she found a package of bacon in the freezer when he's supposed to be eating healthier food. He tells her to relax, he bought it for a recipe. She suspiciously eyes him and asks what recipe. He mumbles, "bacon and eggs".

This comes to mind because I wound up using the Canadian bacon I bought to use in other recipes as the main part of the meal this morning.

My Generic breakfast starts as a toasted, buttered bagel and depending upon time, hunger and how inclined I'm feeling about cleaning up, add cheese, eggs (fried or scrambled) or both. I wasn't in the mood to clean a pan and spatula and definitely not a mixing bowl and whisk on top of that. Remember the old jingle about "eggs, Canadian bacon, cheese and [English] muffin are the makin' of your morning"? Probably not. You have to be old and lived in front of the TV that month.

So I had no egg, and substituted a bagel for the English muffin. Whatever.

Meals for Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Mushroom omelette, BBQ chicken pizza bagel, Chicken pasta salad.

Breakfast was an omelette with mushrooms. The mushrooms were part of the gravy for the roast beef for a past last weekend. I heated them in a pan with a little olive oil, cut them up a little (probably should've done that first, but then there would've been something else to wash), poured in a scrambled egg on top it.

Lesson Learned: Check the house for bread before starting this. There were bagels in the freezer, but I wanted one for lunch. The choices were burger and hot dog buns or taking a walk to the bakery for a decent roll. I had already started cooking and it was already 85 degrees outside and climbing. When the egg and flipped and done, I cut it into three long slices with the spatula and nestled it on a hot dog bun. Egg was good, but overall a little bit of letdown. Also, it could've used some cheese, but I thought of that too late.

Lunch was a bagel pizza. Thanks to the heat, the bagel thawed on the counter in about 15 minutes. (By the way, the bagels were bought fresh, not frozen. We freeze the extras.) Sliced it open and squeezed some Famous Dave's BBQ Sauce on both halves, spreading it with a knife, and toasted the bagel for a minute or two. Back to the fridge for the leftover grilled chicken from last night and a couple of string cheeses, shredding both. After removing the bagels from the toaster oven, I lined the rack with foil, put the bagels back and added the chicken, topped with cheese (and a little more BBQ sauce, why not?). Set the toaster oven to bake at 350 and let it heat up for about 5-6 minutes. Not bad. I could've added some mushrooms, but I didn't know how the gravy and the BBQ sauce would interact.

I'd try this again, fiddling with the ingredients.
By the way, I like fresh mozzerella for sandwiches, but I've learned that it's too watery for stuff like this.

Dinner preparation started early. I boiled half a box of mini-penne just so there would be some pasta in the fridge in case anyone wanted to make microwave mac-n-cheese. Then I glanced at the back of the box and saw the pasta salad. Since I knew we were having the leftover chicken for dinner (did I mention the heat outside? I wasn't going to the grill again), I changed what I would've had, which was grilled chicken salad (lettuce, tomato, chick peas and chicken, with Caesar dressing) to pasta salad. Heated up some generic (but small) frozen veggies. When we were ready to eat (in the A/C'ed living room with a tape-delay of the game on), I threw some pasta in the bowl with sliced chicken and a couple of scoops of veggies. I added in some olive oil and a splash of milk. (The box called for heavy cream. I made do.) Thirty seconds nuking later, I was having dinner.

Verdict: A little on the dry side. I like sauce. Maybe it needed more oil. Maybe it needed the cream. But it's something that could be improved upon rather than thrown out.