Breakfast for Dinner Goes Epic

Hey there, I'm back again!

I think we all get the urge to make breakfast for dinner once in a while, whether it's a simple plate of bacon and eggs or pancakes or going whole hog for a batch of Eggs Benedict. Well, as I recently posted, I'm a big fan of the latest (to Canada) breakfast classic-in-the-making: Chicken and Waffles!

But, me being me, and Kari being Kari, we weren't going to go the traditional route of fried chicken on a sweet waffle with syrup (and maybe gravy) on top, we were going to try something completely new (maybe).

So for our version of Chicken and Waffles, we used a savoury waffle batter using goat cheese and fresh basil and instead of fried chicken, we kept the Italian influence going with Chicken Parmesan (with Kari's fresh-made tomato sauce, of course!). As a topping, we figured everything can use a touch of bacon-like flavour, but to be thematically consistent, I decided to fry up some Sopressata Salami instead. Also, building on the idea of Garlic Maple Syrup from our last trip to Murray Street, I whipped together a garlic-balsamic-maple sauce. Because HELL YES!

Now, this one is going to take some time, because there was a lot going on with this dish (because it was a rare Saturday off together and we're lunatics).

Here are the four main components of the dish:

Savoury Goat Cheese and Basil Waffles
Chicken Parmesan
Crispy Sopressata Bits
Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce

Kari got the ball rolling by putting together the tomato sauce for the Chicken Parmesan (some day I'll actually reprint the recipe for this):

Saucy!

Meanwhile, I went to the Internet for inspiration, having never made waffle batter before. I pretty much followed the recipe below from Allrecipes.com, while omitting some ingredients, and adding others:

Getting pointers online

So here is the revised recipe:

Savoury Goat and Cheese and Basil Waffle Batter

- Makes 6-8 waffles

Ingredients

- 2 eggs

- 2 cups all-purpose flour

- 1 3/4 cups milk

- 1/2 cup olive oil

- 4 tsp baking powder

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper

- 3-4 tbsp fresh basil, finely chopped or 2 tsp dry basil

- 70 g (half a small package) goat cheese

Directions

- Beat the eggs with a fork or hand mixer until fluffy. 

- Mix in flour, milk, oil, baking powder, salt, pepper and basil until batter is smooth. 

- Slowly beat in goat cheese, a few small pieces at a time until well blended into batter. 

- Set batter aside in the fridge while making other components. 

Batter up! 

Next up is the chicken for the Chicken Parmesan. As most of you already know, Chicken Parmesan is basically a breaded and baked breast or cutlet of chicken topped with marinara sauce and melted cheese. Now, I've probably said it before, but I tend to prefer chicken thighs (boneless and skinless) to chicken breast. They have more flavour and are almost always way cheaper. Also in the case of this particular recipe, thigh pieces  were the right size for the proportion of one piece of chicken to one waffle (with two of each per serving).

Chicken Parmesan

- Makes 6 servings

Ingredients

- 6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, pounded flat (directions to come)
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup panko
- Tomato sauce (pre-made)
- 6 slices cheese, cut to cover chicken (usually parmesan, but here I used mostly mozzarella and a pinch of parmesan)

Directions

Before doing anything, make sure the oven is preheated at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The first step to getting the chicken ready is bashing it into cutlet shape. There are several ways to achieve this, but the best for this recipe was to pound the chicken flat.

This is done by resting a piece of chicken between two sheets of wax paper and pounding it flat using a meat hammer. In our case, since Kari has lots of neato kitchen gadgets, we used this weighted doohickey that looks like some sort of futuristic gavel.

Below is the "before and after" of that process:

Chicken - pre-pounded

Chicken - post-pounded

So, once that's taken care of five more times (or however many piece of chicken you have), it's time to bread those suckers!

You'll need a container with flour, another with milk and another with whatever you're coating the chicken with. In this case, I recommend panko breadcrumbs, mixed with a pinch each of salt, pepper and oregano. If you're lucky enough to have a home breading station, as my gadget-addicted girlfriend does, well your set up is easy! If not, simply fill three bowls with each component.

The dredging station

The process for breading your chicken is fairly simple: coat with flour, then milk, then breading. Boom, done. Try to have only one hand handle the meat since this can be a a rather messy process and better to only have one hand covered in shmutz than both.

So follow along with my how-to in pictures!

Step 1 - dredge in flour

Step 2 - soak in milk

Step 3 - coat with breadcrumb mixture

Ready for the oven!

Once breaded, set a wire rack over a foil-lined cookie sheet and place chicken on the rack. Bake for about 15-20 minutes until golden brown and crunchy.

Next, turn the oven to broil. Without removing the chicken from the rack, top each piece with a dollop of tomato sauce and a slice of cheese. Broil in the oven until cheese turns golden brown and bubbly.

Chicken is baked, now to broil the cheese

Turn off oven and keep chicken warm in the oven.

Crispy Sopressata Bits

Next up is the Crispy Sopressata Bits. This part's pretty darn simple. Fry Sopressata in a hot cast iron pan (with just a bit of bacon fat) until it's crispy. Set out on paper towel to absorb grease. Break up pieces of meat with fingers or knife and set aside.

Crispy fried Sopressata... 

...becomes a substitute for bacon bits!

And now we get to the Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce, which is really just those three ingredients mixed together and reduced.

A cross-cultural culinary love affair in the making

Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce

Ingredients

- 1/2 cup maple syrup

- 3-4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped or minced

- 3-4 tbsp balsamic vinegar 

- salt and pepper to taste

Directions

- Bring maple syrup to a boil in a small saucepan. 

- Reduce heat to medium, add garlic and reduce for about 5 minutes.

- Stir in balsamic and reduce for another 10 minutes until syrupy. 

- Season with salt and pepper before serving. 

Halfway through cooking the sauce, preheat the waffle iron.

Preparing the Garlic-Balsamic-Maple Sauce 

Next up, we cook the waffles. Essentially just pour a half-cup of batter per waffle onto the pre-heated iron and cook until crispy and golden (about 10 minutes). 

Waffley goodness!

Finally, it's time to put it all together. There are two ways to plate this one. 

The first is to put the waffles and chicken side by side, which is the more traditional presentation. Top the waffles with the sauce and sopressata bits, as shown below:

Let's eat!

The second way is to put the chicken on top of the waffles and pouring the sopressata bits and sauce all over the whole thing, which is how Mill Street does it: 

Let's also eat!

So, the verdict on this over-the-top experiment in tasty decadence? It was really, really freakin' good! The Waffles were rich and flavourful without being too much so. I wasn't sure if the goat cheese would work, but it totally did! The Chicken Parmesan was, well, Chicken Parmesan, which is pretty fail-proof as a flavour profile. The Garlic-Maple-Balsamic Sauce was a great mix of sweet and tangy that offset the richness of the waffles and chicken and the Crispy Sopressata Bits added a salty component that tied the whole thing together beautifully, and the whole affair was a nod to Italian cuisine, although I doubt any chef in Italy has tried this before!

All in all, this was a fantastic epicurean endeavour that I would totally make again, time permitting. This was quite a time-consuming effort, but nothing was terribly difficult to put together and the flavour was unique and delicious and totally worth it. 

If you give it a shot, tell me how it went! I'd love to hear if I'm the only one crazy enough to try this out!

Breakfast Goodness - part 4 - Where To Get The Goodness Made for You in Ottawa

Hey there!

We're back to look at breakfast and specifically what happens when the idea of making it yourself seems ludicrous. We've all been there: whether it's weekend laziness, workday timing or a brain-splitting hangover on any given morning, we've all been in a situation where making breakfast at home is simply a no-go. Luckily, pretty much any decently-sized city has somewhere you can go for breakfast/brunch. Some of us are lucky to live in cities large enough to have all kinds of great breakfast options.

While Ottawa's best known (downtown) breakfast nooks might be the Elgin Street Diner or Zak's Diner, neither of these will be featured in this post, mainly because they're not all that impressive to me. For standard breakfast/brunch fare, I've always found the Lieutenant's Pump or the Manx on Elgin Street are far better value for the money. And if you want to greasy spoon it up for real, there's Mellos on Dalhousie. All of these and many others are adequate, even remarkable, places to indulge your need for bacon n' eggs, but in this post I'm going to tell you about some of Ottawa's truly exceptional breakfast experiences, as well as plugging something awesome should you decide you *can* make it at home.

1 - Chicken and Waffles

A couple of years ago, the concept of Chicken and Waffles was completely ensconced in the realm of "crazy-ass things that Americans put into their bodies". There's been references to this incredulous dish in film and TV (I think Pulp Fiction mentioned Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles at some point), but surely no one would try to export the idea outside of the U.S., would they? Well one man did, Chef LeRoy, formerly of Jean Albert's Soul Food restaurant, which has, unfortunately, closed its doors. But Chef LeRoy was the first to bring Chicken and Waffles to Canada (and still makes them via catering). Since then, many restaurants all around have come out with their own version of this soul food classic.

And, I hate to say it, I find Mill Street has done it better (sorry LeRoy). Probably because they threw authenticity out the window and went for "over-the-top tasty". Mill Street's Chicken and Waffles is boneless chicken tenders coated in a thick, peppery, crispy buttermilk batter served over a giant waffle made with Belgian Wit beer and topped with rich chicken gravy, with maple syrup on the side. There is truly no better hangover food that I can think of, and you'll be full for the rest of the day! Seriously, only get this if you have a giant appetite, it's a stuffer! It's also 14 bucks, so not a cheap breakfast by any stretch. But treat yourself to it at least once in your life, you'll thank me!

Leading potential cause of my obesity, except the beer

2 - Gourmet-ing Classic Breakfast Fare

Let's face it, one can get the standard 2 eggs with bacon/sausage/ham, homefries and toast plate just about anywhere and it's not very different from one place to the next. I honestly don't know WHY breakfast in Canada and the U.S. has become limited to only a dozen or so "classic"dishes, but it has. I guess that's fine if you use really good ingredients and make it original. So with that in mind, I present the Murray Street Brunch.

Murray Street, as I've mentioned before, is one of those high end restaurants that makes what one could call "gourmet comfort food". This certainly applies to their brunch offerings. Last time we went for breakfast/brunch, the menu just sang out all kinds of fun little renditions of classics and a lot of creative twists. But for me it came down to three simple words: Garlic. Maple. Syrup. FRAK YES!!! It helps that said syrup was the topping to a kind of reinvented "McGriddle" dish called the Pauly-D. It consisted of an in-house-made sage-ginger-maple sausage patty, a fried egg, cheese and pancakes. And it was goddamn delicious!!!! I was even lucky enough to have a server who told me how to make Garlic Maple Syrup (which will be featured in a future post).



the Breakfast Sammich as God intended

 

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Kari's epic breakfast as well. Her Corned Beef dish was a madcap fusion of Eggs Benedict and some kind of Denny's skillet monstrosity featuring cheese, potatoes, corned beef, egg all under a bone marrow Hollandaise. BONE MARROW HOLLANDAISE!!!! Who comes up with this stuff? Oh right, this guy does.

 

Needless to say, it was about as rich as rich gets. I have to admit, I'm not a huge Hollandaise fan. It's something I can only eat when I get a craving for it, which happens once or twice a year, kind of like poutine. But when I get that craving, WATCH OUT! That being said, today was not that day. All I know is that Kari loved it, so it must have been awesome.

I'm getting full just looking at it...

3 - On Your Way To The Office (aka Screw Timmies!)

I'll admit I'm plugging food purveyors that I've already blogged about in the past, but what can I say? I'm loyal to really top-notch restaurants and bakeries!

So, moving on. It's 6:55 and you're due in the office at 7. Not really time for a big hearty breakfast is it? Now you could go to Tim Horton's or Starbucks for their overprocessed (albeit sometimes tasty) breakfast fare and some okayish coffee. OR you could truck out to Bread and Sons (and if you work for the feds in Ottawa like I do, it's not much of a truck - or is it trek?) and partake of some of the city's best coffee (as I've already mentioned). On top of that, you can treat yourself to either a Boreka or a Black Bean Roll.

A Boreka is a puff pastry stuffed with feta and two other unidentified cheeses (it used to be just feta) dusted with sesame seeds and is pretty much the best morning salt rush a person can ask for. As for the Black Bean Roll, it's a black bean and cheese filling surrounded by a rich buttery pastry shell. It's basically an entire meal in 3 inches. Way better than a doughnut or McMuffin. 

Want to eat them alllllll!!

And finally, as a last little breakfast plug, I want to give a "shoutout" to Michael McKenzie and his charcuterie business, Seed to Sausage for making some of the best bacon I've ever had that wasn't mine (hey, no food is better than that you make yourself, including charcuterie/deli). Specifically his Garlic-Juniper Bacon. Yes, it's a bit more expensive than the commercial stuff from the supermarket, but it is TOTALLY worth it. It's another one of those "once in a lifetime" flavours everyone needs to try. Luckily, they sell it at Saslove's Meat Market in the Market and on Wellington Street, and many other shops as well.




Bacon Heaven - photo from the Saslove's Web site

So, now you know where to get the goods. Get out there and snarf some scran, man!

Cheers!