lyagushka's Full Review: Marie Simmons - The Good Egg: More Than 200 Fresh ...
Adding four "retirement age" laying hens to my household was supposed to provide us with something on the order of 12-16 eggs per week. Instead, we're getting about 28 eggs per week. That means we've been eating a lot more eggs than previously. Obviously, I went looking for interesting egg recipes. Marie Simmons' cookbook, The Good Egg, has been most helpful in this search.
Simmons is of Italian descent, and she also trained as a pastry chef. She acknowledges that both of these facts have influenced her tastes and her cooking enormously. Many of her recipes have an Italian feeling about them, even if they are not traditional Italian recipes. For instance, several of her egg salad recipes are dressed with olive oil rather than mayonnaise. Showing her patisserie training, she includes an entire chapter on meringues and soufflés.
I found the recipes in The Good Egg to be very easy to follow and well put together. The recipes are grouped by chapters into broad categories. There are three chapters devoted to typical breakfast preparations of eggs, each one covering different cooking methods: scrambled & fried, omelettes & frittatas, and baked and poached eggs. Of course, these recipes can do duty for meals other than breakfast, and there are chapters for stews, pastas, egg salads, stuffed eggs, breads and desserts.
There are quite a few intriguing recipes in The Good Egg, showing influences from a wide swath of the western world. Simmons' background may be Italian, but she pulls in traditions from Greece, Spain, Portugal and even as far afield as Afghanistan. I was pleased with the wide variety of influences in the recipes. Too often single food themed cookbooks simply trot out a boring parade of the same tired dishes, retooled to include the featured ingredient. The Good Egg doesn't do this. The book is full of fresh ideas and well-tested recipes. Since I'm pretty well versed in omelettes, and breakfast preparations, I was most interested in the salads, soups/stews and non-meringue desserts.
One of the first recipes I tried was the sumptuous Strawberry Jam Bread Pudding with Almond Streusel. Granted, I tweaked it to use up the wild berry jam we had on hand, but it was absolutely delicious, and not at all difficult to prepare. This is a recipe I will definitely make again and again. Next I tried the Roasted Beet & Egg Salad with Arugula and Sherry Vinaigrette. This was one of the several egg salads with no mayo. Again it was very easy to prepare and tasted pretty good. I did find it just a little bland, though the orange zest in the vinaigrette added a nice bright flavor to the dressing. I would likely add a little raw garlic and/or some mustard the next time I make it.
After a little negotiation, I got my husband to agree to try the Dandelion Greens, Pancetta and Egg Salad for dinner one night. We have plenty of large and tender dandelion greens on the borders of our property, but he was a little resistant, to say the least, about having weeds for dinner. The fact that the salad contains cured pork probably tipped the balance. This egg salad isn't anything like the typical egg salad bound with mayonnaise and only accented with ingredients other than hard-cooked eggs. It's really a dish of greens wilted in olive oil and bacon fat, then garnished with chopped egg. It was a success. We scarfed it up and wondered how quickly the dandelions would grow another crop of large tender leaves. We take enormous satisfaction in producing our own food, or even eating what produces itself without a lick of help from us.
Simmons' range of stuffed egg dishes wowed me. I had perused a small book devoted entirely to variations on deviled eggs and found little to interest me. The hard-cooked egg recipes in The Good Egg all sounded great. I tried the Chipotle Chile Stuffed Eggs and found them marvelous. It's nice too that she writes the recipes in this chapter for just four hard-cooked eggs. Most deviled egg type recipes call for a dozen, requiring me to figure out the scale-down quantities myself. It's usually easier for me to scale up, so I appreciate Simmons' portion sizes.
Simmons handles the layout of her recipes in a no nonsense manner. Each recipe fits neatly on a single page, or at most two facing pages, so there's no need to flip pages while preparing a dish. The ingredients and directions occupy separate and easy to read columns. Unfortunately, there are no photographs within the book, though there are a few on the front and back cover. Even without pictures, the recipes sound very tempting.
With the exception of the chapters on meringues (whipped egg white dishes) and soufflés, I think the recipes in The Good Egg are accessible to cooks with very modest experience in the kitchen. I didn't test any of the meringue or soufflé recipes, because I'm not really interested in those preparations, but any recipe involving whipped egg whites presents significant challenges to novice cooks.
On the other hand, Simmons has no problem teaching the basics, such as how to produce the perfect hard-cooked egg, or custardy scrambled eggs. She includes a fair degree of detail in her recipe directions so that it's clear how to proceed. The vast majority of the recipes are not especially time consuming or difficult. Also, she provides a good deal of flexibility in her recipes so that substitution suggestions are common. Don't have any sour cream? She'll tell you to use mayonnaise instead. Dislike dill or don't have any? She suggests several alternative herbs.
I enjoy the quotations and bits of poetry that fill up some of the extra spaces throughout the book. This one, introducing the chapter on custards, ice creams, and nogs, especially pleased me for some reason:
Alas! My child, where is the Pen,
That can do justice to the Hen?
...Laying foundations every day
Though not for public buildings, yet
For Custards, Cakes and Omelette,
...No wonder, Child, we prize the Hen,
Whose egg is mightier than the Pen."
-Oliver Herford
I got this book through the inter-library loan program. I've scanned about 25 of the recipes to have on hand in my kitchen. The Good Egg is good enough that I'm going to strongly recommend it be added to my local library's collection. I would readily recommend it to anyone who enjoys eating eggs. Though not a vegetarian cookbook, a great many of the recipes are suitable for vegetarians. It can be a great help too for those who are looking to build meals around a relatively cheap source of protein as food prices continue to rise sharply.
I can also recommend these cookbooks:
• The Bread Baker's Apprentice - superlative, expert instruction for mastering yeasted breads
• Baking With Julia - Julia Child's award-winning "bakebook", covers all type of baked goods
• Indian Cooking - excellent cookbook by Jaffrey for beginner cooks, includes many meat dishes
• Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - encyclopedic, with a great dessert section
• Cooking with Pomiane - a deliciously nostalgic review of culinary history, narrated by a great wit
• The Boulevard Cookbook - sumptuous recipes from San Francisco's favorite restaurant
• America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - trustworthy guide to all home cooking fundamentals
• Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America - accessible, delicious recipes for nibbles or a hearty meal
• World Vegetarian - suitable for slightly more experienced cooks & essential for vegetarians
• The New Best Recipe - 1000 canonical recipes, perfected
• Dim Sum - the art of Chinese tea lunch
• The Wellness Encyclopedia - an excellent reference guide to the nutritional facts on most anything you could put in your mouth
• Nigella Express - quick recipes for those who really like to cook
• The Good Egg - fresh & tasty recipes based on the incredible, edible egg
The author of Lighter, Quicker, Better turns her expertise to the indispensable egg, providing recipes for plenty of standbys as well as hundreds of e...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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