Brunch

Try as I might, I just couldn’t leave the bacon out of this omelet. Obviously, nothing goes better with eggs. But beyond that, bacon gives the slightly bitter chard an addictive smoky and, well, meaty flavor, while the goat cheese offsets it all with a tart creaminess. The result: a hearty, one-dish meal.

The payoff for having made the Stewed Cauliflower, Butternut Squash, and Tomatoes (page 55), beyond that first bowl of pasta I hope you had with it, is that you can use it for quick treatments such as this one. With its runny yolk enriching the vegetables, it’s a satisfying breakfast dish on its own, or it can morph into a brunch or breakfast-for-dinner dish with the addition of crusty bread and a side salad.

This is a recipe for those of us who are so reverent toward farm-fresh eggs that we’ll stand at the stove for almost a half hour, stirring them like a fine risotto. It seems crazy as you’re doing it, especially since nothing seems to happen for the first 15 minutes or so, but your perseverance will be rewarded with eggs that have a texture beyond compare, unless you’re comparing it to, say, lemon curd, one of the most luxuriously textured foods I know. I refer to eggs done this way as a reverse custard, with more eggs than cream instead of vice versa. I call for the Red Pepper Chutney (page 17) as an accompaniment, but this is such a fabulous way to make eggs, you can combine them with bacon for something even more basic, or you can add any manner of seasonal vegetables, lightly steamed or, better yet, sautéed in butter. If, unlike me, you can’t imagine spending this much time on eggs for one, invite a few friends over for brunch, multiply this by four, and try it out on them. You’ll see.

I spend a bundle on mushrooms from a bountiful display at the Dupont Circle FreshFarm Market just about every Sunday—but not in the summer. That’s because mushrooms are available practically year-round (many of them are cultivated), while tomatoes, corn, broccoli, and the like have a shorter season. So I reserve my mushroom purchases for when the bulk of the other seasonal produce has faded or hasn’t quite arrived. In the spring, I love to combine them with one of the items I spend all winter looking forward to: green garlic, basically an immature form of the plant, picked before it has fully formed its bulbous collection of cloves. You can use the whole thing like a leek or green onion (both of them in the same family), but it has the addictive taste of fresh, pungent garlic throughout. Since I also associate spring with eggs, I like to pair them with mushrooms and green garlic in a simple frittata. If you can’t find green garlic or want to make this in another season, feel free to substitute a small leek. Eat this frittata with a side dish, such as salad, bread, and/or hash browns, for a filling meal.

Life is so important. There is something you really need to say. But the high voltage coil of iron-rich Alaea Hawaiian salt rimming the Bloody Mary glass at your finger draws you like an electromagnet. The first sip trips the circuit and sends the electrical charge through your body, electrifying your nervous system, vibrating your body, rebooting the brain stem. The surge of spicy tomato juice, tangy citrus, and vaporizing horseradish courses through you. A nibble at the turgid stalk of celery returns things to rights, but by now you are far away, refreshed, restored, forgetting what it was you wanted to say.

Eggs barely hard-cooked, dolloped with housemade mayo: without this simple, affordable bistro food, I would surely have perished under a bridge on the banks of the glittering Seine. A few bucks buys you a seat at a rickety table on a busy street for as long as you wish, leaving you free to jot remembrances and ideas as you soak up the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris. A crust of baguette dipped in the heavenly silkiness of real mayonnaise, a bite of egg, a sip of crisp lager, and you will want for little else in life, ever again, so long as you live. The waiter will scrupulously not talk to you. The beauty who spares you a cigarette flashes only a fleeting smile before vanishing. You are free, wonderfully alone. Most of my jotted remembrances and ideas revolved around my unending astonishment at just how good real mayonnaise can be. To emphasize the distinction between the ethereal wholesomeness of handmade mayo and the gelatinous goop that comes from a jar, I still refer to it by its breathy French name—just say it: oeuf mayonnaise. Homemade mayonnaise normally calls for a sprinkle of salt, but dissolving the salt in the sauce is a missed opportunity. Sprinkling little rubies of coarse alaea salt over a plop of mayonnaise reveals the clandestine romance of salt and sauce, animating this inscrutable dish, drawing attention to its splendors, and lending a glimpse of Paris to your day.

The only place to start with something so absurd yet perfect as this dish is in the middle. The bacon is ready to flip in about a minute and a half. The edges get super-crispy (who has ever noticed before that bacon has corners?), while the lean inside stays wet and meaty. And the fat actually firms and ripples, like lardo that’s been working out. Suspense builds when you flip the bacon and crack the eggs on top. It’s awful—like watching a landslide threaten to wipe out your village—as the egg whites run toward the edge of the hot brick, but the salt is so hot they rapidly lose steam (pun intended) and sizzle to a halt, with at most just a few rivulets dribbling over the sides of the block. The whole thing is done in less than 5 minutes. Take a bite and things get weirder still, with the sheen of salt simmering underneath the egg and bacon instead of on top, and a jumble of textures—creamy, crunchy, chewy, juicy, fatty, fleshy, and eggy.

Mushrooms, noble as they may be, are not proud creatures. Poking their heads up from the loam, they stand humbly with a prepossessing calm that more or less begs us to pluck them. Fresh eggs, once you face off the fierce gaze of the hen and pull them from under her warm breast, are similarly good-natured, understated and half-smiling like the oval face of a Modigliani portrait. But dress the egg and the mushroom with a pinch of black truffle and the two rise up, swell with pride, and regale you with their tales of farm and forest.

Impress your Jewish grandma with gravlax, or just impress yourself. Actually, my Nana preferred the cold-smoked cousin, lox, but gravlax is an incredibly easy, positively delicious way to cure salmon. The name comes from any number of Nordic fish dishes inspired by the openly morbid technique of burying in the ground (grave) your salmon (lax) with some salt cure. I like this dish because it yields a particularly moist, delicate, and lightly salted gravlax, since the salinity of the salt block does not migrate as readily into the fish flesh as a packed cure of loose salt. Also, because you don’t need plates and weights, and because the salt blocks can be reused over and over again, the method boasts a certain elegance and economy of tools. See page 267 for more about salt blocks.

If there is any dish that could be served with every meal, every day, morning, noon, and night, it’s butter leaf lettuce salad. Eggs Benedict with butter leaf lettuce salad; cheeseburgers with butter leaf lettuce salad; pasta alla carbonara with butter leaf lettuce salad. Or, for a snack, just butter leaf lettuce salad. Its acidic elegance balances out the heartiness of any meal. The trick is the dressing. Making your own vinaigrette is among the biggest single improvements you can do in the kitchen—it becomes a distillation of your aesthetic defined by acid, oil, sweetness, and salt. Jennifer’s mastery of the vinaigrette has done more to promote the advancement of cuisine in our house than anything else: the shallots discover a plump, inner sweetness in the vinegar; the olive oil expresses its spicy-green spirit in response to the pepper; and the mustard emulsifies so that the dressing coats the lettuce in silkiness. Then the Maldon, strewn across the surface of the dressed salad—a glittering fencework of flakes perched along the crests and vales of lettuce—snaps like static electricity to stimulate the palate—a flash of pungency that illuminates everything so quickly and clearly that it is gone before you have time to fully comprehend what happened. This is Maldon’s raison d’etre: to reveal and amplify, then vanish, leaving you with only the desire for another bite.

We use Benton’s bacon, the meatiest, smokiest bacon around, in our plugs. If you have the Momofuku cookbook, you know the wonders and glories of Allan Benton, the man behind the smoky cured pork down in Madisonville, Tennessee. His product reigns supreme in punch-you-in-the-face bacon flavor. When he answers the phone himself to take your order, you know you are getting a handmade, superior product from a man who loves his art and keeps it simple—even though he has orders from all over the country to fill that day, many from big-name chefs and restaurants in NYC and beyond. I have been known to swap cookies for moonshine with this adorable man—both of us feeling like we’ve made out like bandits.

Mascarpone cheese is a little fussy. It breaks really easily, so it is important here to make sure that both the lemon curd and the mascarpone are cold. Don’t even think about overmixing this!

This is the first croissant we ever made and sold at Milk Bar. Deeply stinky and pungent in all the right ways, it is not for the faint of heart. It is a true marriage of funky, barnyardy, stringent kimchi and blue cheese, of our Korean roots to our Italian ones. It is for our soul sisters and brothers. Making croissants is one of the coolest bread techniques around. You spend time making many layers of bread dough and butter, folding and turning the dough all along. When baked, the croissants get their flakiness and volume from the steam that the layers of butter give off as the dough heats. The steam separates each dough layer ever so slightly, resulting in this massively puffy, impossibly flaky creation. And when you make them with a flavored butter, they’re even cooler! Though we have simplified the technique somewhat at Milk Bar, in terms of speed and precision, this recipe is still not for softbodies. It takes more time with the dough, more flour, more time with the rolling pin. But it will make you feel like a true pro when the oven timer goes off and you pull these bad boys out.

If you really want to replicate the Chef Shack’s most popular fall dish, go organic with the eggs and milk, try to get your hands on some bacon beer brats (they use Fischer Farms), and crisp up the bread in a deep fryer. If that sounds out of reach for you, your favorite pork sausage links will do, and a griddle or frying pan should work almost as well.