I’ve been making a bunch of egg jars this year and learning a lot in the process. I’ve never been much of a cook, which is funny because I was a short order cook at Waffle House for a few years, but outside of an industrial kitchen I have no idea of what I’m doing.
For the past 6 weeks I’ve been making a different style egg jar each week. Here are a few different examples:
I aint no cook, but I’ve been really enjoying my new weekly ritual of cooking egg jars each Sunday morning. The jars are simple, healthy, and easy for us to take to work each day for breakfast.
The basic idea is that you prepare some veggies and grains (or legumes), put them in a small jar, drop a raw egg on top, then double boil the jars for about 10 minutes to cook the eggs. The total cooking time is about an hour, but then you are set for 6 meals, and it’s really fun to experiment with. This week’s jars included duck eggs, bamboo rice, mushrooms, and red peppers. I start with a cup of lentils or rice, then add 1.5 cups of chicken broth and let them cook. I made my own chicken broth yesterday, which was way easier than I expected. As for the veggies, I usually do mushrooms and the white part of green onions and try not to overcook them. I set the green parts of the onions in a separate bowl and add them on top after the jars are fully cooked. I really don’t know my way around the kitchen, but I do enjoy making my meals look nice, so I like to add little touche (like the green onions) to make the jars feel more like a meal. Since I was using bamboo rice, which has a great green color, I decided to dice up raw red peppers and mix them in with the rice just for a high contrast. I also like to drop a dollop of sichuan chili oil onto the cooked egg before I add the green onion tops. Another important step is to put a light coat of oil along the inside walls of the jars to make clean up easier. Trust me.
I’m not great at following recipes, but these jars are extremely forgiving and easy to improvise. Each week I stop by Rainbow Grocery and pick out some exotic sounding rice, then figure out some fun things to combine with it. In all honesty, it’s helped me learn a lot more about cooking than what I already knew, and making me feel a lot more confident about learning how to cook more. Plus its a healthy start to each day.
I was at a holiday party a few weeks back and made a joke about making tiramisu with animal crackers and calling it “tiramizoo”. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, so I had to make it!
I’ve never made custard before, so I was lucky that Christine was around to make sure I wasn’t messing it up, but everything else was pretty straightforward. I essentially followed a pretty basic tiramisu recipe (find it here), but used animal crackers and homemade coffee whiskey (recipe here). The end result was fantastic and the animal crackers could really work as a basic substitute if you don’t have lady fingers lying around.
I was asked to create some GIFs for a new gorilla art project called The Hard G Project. The organizers gave me a couple of tablets to display the gifs on and I got to decide when, where, and how the art was hung. The idea was that we’d leave the tablets up, with my art animating, and they stay up until they are stolen or the batteries die.
I hung one of my pieces on Clarion Alley and stuck around to watch a few people interact with it. When I came back 4 or 5 hours later, I was surprised at what I found… the iPad had been switched to camera mode and a bunch of people took selfies from this odd little iPad hanging in an Alley.
That feeling when people like taking selfies more than they like your art. Sigh…
