Cooking Lessons with Zoe

This summer Zoe has requested cooking lessons. She's had enough of my overly ambitious attempts to teach her where I end up hovering and doing things for her, so she has specifically requested instruction in the basics. Really basic building blocks. Like white rice. Couscous. Fried eggs. Cooked beans. Plain pasta. The idea is to eventually explore the more adventurous variations of each item. Like going from white rice to brown rice to sushi rice, then to pilafs and risottos. BUT. For now I'm not allowed to jump ahead. I have to give a self-satisfied smirk, though, that she considers cooking dried beans from scratch a basic skill. I agree with her, but I realize many excellent cooks don't. We also get to tackle basic white bread in the breadmaker, muffins, marinara sauce, roast chicken, and even fish.

Tomorrow it's how to poach eggs and how to cook pasta. We'll have the poached eggs with toast for breakfast, and for dinner I'll make some kind of pasta sauce out of the spinach from our farm delivery and some ricotta that is crying to get out of the refrigerator.

I'm really looking forward to this!

Poached Eggs

Bring a shallow pot of water to a gentle simmer. Spray a little cooking oil on the surface of the water to help keep the eggs from sticking to the bottom. Crack the eggs and slide them gently into the water (some people like to crack them into a bowl first to make it more gentle, but I only rarely bother). Splash a little water over the top if the egg is not fully submerged. Cook until the yolk is as done as you like it, then remove with a slotted spoon. The trick with poached eggs is to keep the temperature of the water right: you don't want too much movement in your simmer - no rolling boils - because that jostles the eggs too much and breaks up the white into lots of foamy little bits that float around. A lower temperature makes for a more shapely egg. Also, it works best with really fresh eggs because the whites are tighter and don't spread out as much.

My favorite way to each poached eggs is on an English muffin with a thin slice of sharp cheddar and maybe even some bacon or sausage. So much better than what you get at Mickey D's.

I think Zoe likes poached better than fried because I'm better at getting the white completely cooked. Maybe I need to read up on fried eggs so I can figure out how to get it right.