Sunday, April 1, 2012

It's time for April Foolish Food: Faux Sunnyside Eggs

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I gotta tell you that forgetting to pick up an essential ingredient for a blog post is the parents (and possibly the grandparents) of invention.

In this case, I needed a small yellow tomato. I saw them at one store, but forgot to pick one up. When I needed the tomato for this post, I went to two different stores and couldn't find one.

There I was, pacing around the produce department looking for something that would work in a revision of this recipe.

I found red tomatoes in several sizes, but I needed something yellow.

I started muttering to myself ... lemons? Yellow squash? What else could I use?

I wanted yellow tomatoes for the color, but I refuse to make food that doesn't taste good. So lemons would have  been a supremely bad idea. While squash wouldn't have been horrendous, it wouldn't have been great, either.

After a lot of in-store brainstorming (and some more mumbling about how I should have bought those tomatoes when I saw them) I bought a yellow bell pepper. The color was right and the flavor profile worked. The only problem was that bell peppers are rigid. But I knew I could fix that.

My previous version was for a faux sunnyside-egg. This time I wanted to do a basted egg - you know - so there's a thin film of the white over the yolk.

To do this, you'll need: 

Bread or English muffin, toasted
Yellow bell pepper.
Small tomatoes
White melty cheese (mozzarella, muenster, or white American would be great)

Roast the peppers and remove the skins. If you need instructions, check here. Remove the core, seeds, and ribs.

Drape the pepper over the tomato, and trim around it so you have a nice dome. If the flesh of the pepper is really thick, you might need to shave a bit off so it drapes better.

Place the tomato half on the bread, top with the pepper, and place the cheese on top.

Melt the cheese in the microwave or under the broiler - you don't want to to brown at all, just melt. If you want to touch it up in places, a culinary torch will do the trick nicely.

A little sprinkle of black pepper over the top is a nice garnish.

Looks like an egg, tastes like grilled cheese.
Yum