Ham Steaks, Juniper, and a Cure for Gallic Ambivalence || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

I suspect that one luckless day a stern mob wearing crisp white aprons and pointy toques will rap on my front door with outstretched palms, insisting I surrender my food-writer membership card.

All because I am not a Francophile.

You know, the Francophile. The man who describes raw triple-cream cheese as enlightenment. The woman who extols the singular crackle and give of a great baguette. The people who proudly know the choicest spot in Paris for the most impeccable plateau de fruits de mer.

I like French food. I do. I sometimes even love it. But I generally prefer the spiced tumble of South Indian dosas and dal. Or the subtle char and zip of a Mexican platter of enchiladas en adobo. Or the fresh counterpoint of a bowl of Vietnamese bun thit nuong cha gio (vermicelli with grilled pork and imperial rolls).

The acute exception to my Gallic ambivalence is pork and juniper, two staples of French regional cooking. Combine the sweet versatility of sausages and cured pork belly with the resinous snap and funk of juniper-laced braised sauerkraut, as in the classic choucroute garnie of Alsace, and I will unfurl the vertical blue, white, and red and start belting “La Marseillaise.”

📷: Denny Culbert

More than a decade ago, when I was both a fledgling writer and a fledgling gay, I went to a conference at the Greenbrier. The stately West Virginia property held an annual Symposium for Professional Food Writers. Cookbook legends and award-winning journalists were always in attendance. I thought if I were also there I might be able to, in time, be like them.

The year I attended, one of the panelists was James Peterson. He is a kind of cookbook creator that barely exists these days. The man wrote tomes, books that regularly topped 500 pages on single subjects like sauces, seafood, and soup. In my edition of his Splendid Soups, the ingredient list runs 29 pages and there are 51 recipes for single-vegetable soups alone. Peterson’s eclectic expertise, his terse opinions and pointed judgments, his sprawling grasp of cooking esoterica all reeked of gayness. I knew because I saw myself in him. That isn’t quite right. No, I saw in him a version of myself I was desperate to become. A me that could become consumed by similar minutiae.

I recall inserting myself into a dining situation with Peterson’s partner, Zelik, Peterson’s agent, Elise Goodman, and Peterson himself, dapper and gray-haired and then about the same age as I am now. Oh, time. Those opportunities seemed to happen constantly during the symposium. The attendees—plebes and experts alike—all stayed on the property in the town of White Sulphur Spring. I twitch now thinking about how obnoxious I was. How ill-informed, too. Peterson was kind. And awkward. He reeked of Manhattanite sophistication. That made me admire him all the more.

📷: Denny Culbert

At the time, his most recent book was Glorious French Food, a 770-page attempt to inventory the breadth of French cooking. It spanned 50 recipe categories, from Assorted Vegetable Salads to Cookies and Candies with a detour through, of course, Baked Whole Truffles. Even the book’s physical dimensions eclipsed the standard: It was enormous. After our chance meeting, I cooked a little from the book, including a sublime version of oeufs en meurette, a homey dish of poached eggs in red wine sauce. I lodged the book on a shelf soon afterward, hesitant about its endless fussy recipes, equivocal about my indifference.

Then, the other week, I pulled the tome from the bookcase that runs down my hallway and paged through it. My eyes saw the book through a clean lens, buffed after 15 more years of cooking and, on my good days, living. Many of the recipes were less daunting than I remembered. A gaggle of pork dishes caught my interest, including one with ham draped in a cream sauce flavored with juniper berries and vinegar.

📷: Denny Culbert

First, you make a roux. In south Louisiana, where gumbo reigns, making roux is as commonplace as boiling water. This I can do. Then you add wine and reduce it because this is French cooking, after all. Then in go finely chopped shallots, crushed juniper berries, black peppercorns, cream, and a wallop of vinegar to shock the richness. Smoked ham steaks, in another deeply French move, are fried in butter, then slicked with the sauce. Porky, rich, homey, sharp.

I write some. I might be more sophisticated than I once was; I’m not sure it matters if I am. But I cook a lot. Sometimes. I will likely never write a 770-page magnum opus on pretty much anything. I might have already become the very person I longed to catalyze all those years ago in West Virginia. Or maybe I will not ever be that version of myself, because that dreaming was a notion, an idea, never capable of being made flesh.

📷: Denny Culbert

Ham With Juniper-Cream Sauce

Serves 5
Adapted from James Peterson’s Glorious French Food

Despite the recipe’s name, vinegar is in many ways the spine of this dish. It’s the element that makes the other components stand erect. Choose a decent vinegar. Your ham will thank you.

• 12 or so juniper berries

• 10 or so black peppercorns

• 2 tablespoons flour

• 4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

• 1 cup dry white wine

• 4 medium shallots, finely chopped

• ¼ cup red wine or sherry vinegar

• ½ cup heavy cream

• 2 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped

• Kosher salt

• 5 thick ham steaks (6 to 8 ounces each), preferably smoked

1. Crush the juniper and peppercorns with the side of a knife or a skillet.

2. Make the roux: In a small saucepan, combine the flour and 2 tablespoons butter and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the flour begins to smell toasted and turns light golden-brown, about 5 minutes. Add half the wine and use a whisk to stir the sauce until it comes to a simmer and begins to thicken. Whisk in the remaining ½ cup wine. Reduce the heat to low and continue simmering the sauce until it has a consistency a little thicker than heavy cream. Add the juniper, peppercorns, shallots, vinegar, and cream and simmer until the sauce has a thick, pourable consistency. Shoot for a consistency that you like. Strain the sauce into a bowl, add the parsley, and season with salt to taste. Return the seasoned sauce to the saucepan and keep warm.

3. In a large skillet set over medium heat, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter. When melted, add the ham steaks and cook each side until the ham is warmed through, about 5 minutes per side. Pat the ham steaks with towels to remove any excess butter so the sauce will cling to the surface of the steaks. Place the ham steaks on either a platter or individual plates, ladle the sauce on top of them, and serve.

The Subtle Revolution of Matcha Poached Eggs || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

In the restaurant and media worlds of northern California, where I worked during the 2000s, “simple” was ubiquitous. The finest compliment you could grant a dish was that it was simple. A simple tomato sauce on spaghetti. A simple roast chicken. A simple salad of garden lettuces with baked goat cheese. An entire region’s cuisine seemingly born of one word. Mid-to-late 20th century cookbooks that helped spawn the California cuisine movement, like Richard Olney’s Simple French Food, broadcast the adjective. Twenty-first century cookbooks, like 2007’s The Art of Simple French Food by the doyenne of Bay Area food, Alice Waters, trumpeted it.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “simple” as follows: 1. Having or being composed of only one thing, element, or part. 2. Not involved or complicated; easy. 3. Being without additions or modifications; mere. 4. Having little or no ornamentation; not embellished or adorned. I will add an additional definition: 5. Makes Scott want to place a shotgun in his mouth and remove the back of his skull.

Everyone’s heart was honorable. You procured good ingredients from good farms and farmers and cooked good food. The heart can lie, though. Too often the cooking was slight, contrived in its sameness. A Californized version of country French and Italian cuisines that wielded simplicity like a cane. Restaurant kitchens feeding people by European groupthink. Who wants to eat only in restaurants what you could make at home?

A ray of light cracked through the haze the same year Waters’s book was published. In 2007, The Breakaway Cook appeared. It did the unthinkable: guided the notion of simplicity down new paths. Its author, Eric Gower, lived and worked in Japan for more than 15 years before returning to San Francisco. During that time, he inadvertently built a new culinary lexicon, one that relied on big, powerful ingredients like miso, pomegranate molasses, citrus, habanero chiles, ginger, kaffir/makrut lime leaves, and matcha.

The two powerhouses of this condiment. 📷: Denny Culbert

One recipe from The Breakaway Cook upended my ideas of cooking: matcha poached eggs. So effortless that it makes simple seem ornate. You combine matcha and coarse salt, then dust it on poached eggs that have been laid on buttered toast. We all know the combination of salt and eggs is mighty tasty. The addition of powdered green tea is alchemical. The egg’s savoriness intensifies. A delicate sweetness murmurs. I do not understand how a subtle addition does this. I no longer wonder. I merely eat the reawakened staple and marvel.

Gower now runs a matcha-fueled company called, predictably, Breakaway Matcha. It sells high-grade matcha, served at some of the Bay Area’s best restaurants, along with ceramics and other matcha-related implements. Me, I am in New Orleans, still starting my mornings with his revelatory eggs 11 years later.

Breakfast will ever be the same. 📷: Denny Culbert

Poached Eggs With Matcha Salt

Serves 2
Adapted from Eric Gower’s The Breakaway Cook

This recipe is so bare-bones, you could skip making the matcha salt and instead sprinkle both flaky salt and matcha over the eggs. Careful, though! You might find a matcha landslide careens onto your eggs if you’re not judicious.

• ¼ cup sel gris (gray salt) or other coarse salt

• 1 teaspoon matcha

• 2 slices of bread

• 2 eggs

• Butter

1. Stir the salt and matcha together in a small container until the salt is fully green. This mixture will last for ages, so best to mix it together in a jar or some such container in which you can store it.

2. Toast and butter the bread. Do this first so you don’t have to worry about it while the eggs are poaching.

3. Poach the eggs in your favorite manner. Mine is to bring a small saucepan about ⅔ full of water to a simmer over the lowest possible heat. If you want to lessen the chances of straggly egg whites, first crack each egg, one at a time, into a fine-mesh strainer, and scrape off any whites that pass through the strainer’s bottom. Then add the remaining egg to the saucepan, stirring gently so the egg doesn’t stick to the base of the pan. Repeat with the other egg. Each egg should cook for about 4 minutes, or until the whites are set.

4. Lift the finished eggs from the saucepan with a slotted spoon or spider strainer and onto a towel to blot moisture from the egg while it’s in the straining implement. Gently slip the eggs onto the buttered toast. Sprinkle the top of each egg with a bit of matcha salt. Eat!

Mexican-Italian Pasta With Garlic and Dried Chiles || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

Pantry pasta is a fulfilling, dependable dish. You take staples like spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, and dried hot chile flakes and fuse them into quick, easy sustenance.

Trouble is, those standbys occasionally swerve into a meal so boring my eyes loll back into my skull. We all need a jolt sometimes, right?

A few years ago, a recipe in Pati’s Mexican Table capsized what had become my ingrained method of cooking pasta with garlic and olive oil. I was intrigued by the recipes in Pati Jinich’s book—a combination of homey Mexican dishes, like pinto bean soup and chilaquiles in red salsa, alongside gently Mexicanized American classics, such as chipotle mashed potatoes and roast turkey marinated with citrus and achiote paste. Jinich’s cooking is a reminder to readers that borders are fluid. Ingredients and techniques cross nations and continents; people do the same. That kind of thinking—and cooking—is a humanizing beacon during these discouraging times, when the hopeful essence of the United States’ potential seems to be in jeopardy.

Your weapons. 📷: Denny Culbert

Jinich’s own recipe for pasta with garlic and olive oil features two simple, profound additions: mild, fruity dried Mexican chiles and strong fresh herbs. Her tangles of spaghetti breathe with a kind of worldliness. It is as if they have taken a sabbatical across central and northern Mexico, acquiring an obsession with guajillo chiles and oregano during their wanderings.

There is flexibility to nearly every component of the dish. The original recipe asks for guajillos, those gentle dried chiles that are one of the most common dried chiles in Mexico. You could also use dried New Mexican or Californian chiles. I have. On the page, Jinich calls for a small handful of big-flavored, chopped fresh herbs: rosemary, thyme, oregano, and marjoram. I have used a different permutation each time I make this pasta. Sometimes two of the four, and always in varying proportions. I insist on marjoram being there. Because I am a marjoram obsessive. Your blueprint: Use at least two different herbs. From there, the ratio is yours. Only mildly interested in rosemary? Use less of it and more of the others. You get the idea.

Smell that garlic and chiles. 📷: Denny Culbert

The cooking itself is seamless. First you add the pasta to salted boiling water. You then warm olive oil until it ripples, and add chopped garlic. In seconds, when the scent of garlic becomes incontrovertible, you toss in finely chopped dried chiles. Suddenly, the smell shifts from hot and garlicky to warm and chile-fruity. Quickly, the chopped herbs go in; the air blooms with musk and pine and sweet greenness. The drained noodles and a gurgle of pasta cooking water are slipped into the skillet and the lot is tossed until a slippery sauce coats the pasta.

If you like, add a grated salty cheese. Pecorino, Cotija, Parmesan. One in that vein. Add some chopped parsley, too, if you want more verdant lift. The result: Italian at the core; Mexican in spirit. Some might call it fusion. I call it smart, modern cooking.

Now, that’s a bowl of Mexi-pasta. 📷: Denny Culbert

Mexican-Italian Pasta With Garlic and Dried Chiles
Serves 4
Adapted from Pati Jinich’s Pati’s Mexican Table

The precise type of dried chiles in this handy dish doesn’t matter, provided you’ve selected a chile that is mild. You could even use a combination of mild chiles if you happen to have more than one on hand. Same goes for the herbs. You want sturdy herbs like the ones listed. But you could use only one, rather than having to source all four.

• 1 pound spaghetti or other thin pasta

• ½ cup olive oil

• 5 garlic cloves, finely chopped

• 1¼ ounce dried mild, fruity chiles, such as guajillos or New Mexican chiles

• 3 tablespoons finely chopped herbs (a mix of any of these: rosemary, thyme, marjoram, oregano)

• Salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

• ½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, Cotija, Pecorino Romano, or ricotta salata (optional)

• 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh Italian parsley (optional)

1. Bring water to a boil in a large pot and add enough salt so it’s almost as salty as the sea when it comes to a boil.

2. Meanwhile, wipe the chiles with a damp cloth, then remove their seeds and finely chop the flesh. Careful! The pieces will want to fly everywhere. (If you haven’t already done so, you could chop the herbs, too, while the pasta water comes to a boil.)

3. Add the pasta to the boiling water and cook, stirring occasionally, until a little less than al dente.

4. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil over medium heat in a very large skillet big enough to hold the pasta. Add the garlic and cook just until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Don’t let it burn! Add the chiles and cook for another 20 seconds or so. Again, when they’re fragrant, move on to the next step. Add the herbs and cook yet again for 20 seconds or so. If the pasta isn’t ready yet, turn the heat to very low.

5. You’ll want to reserve some of the starchy cooking water, so strain the noodles into a colander set over a mug or measuring cup.

6. Add the pasta to the skillet, increase the heat back to medium, and add about ½ cup pasta cooking water. Cook, tossing, for another couple minutes, adding more cooking water if needed, until the pasta is al dente and slicked with sauce. Season to taste with pepper. You probably won’t need more salt, especially if you’re adding cheese. Toss with the cheese and parsley, if using either or both. Serve either family style on one large plate or divide among individual plates.

The Best Red Beans Are a Little Bit Cajun and a Little Bit Basque || RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

There was a time, New Orleans mythology says, when red beans and rice were a Monday-only kind of dish. New Orleans’s homemakers, busy washing clothes all day, the story goes, would throw a pot of red beans on the stove, buttressed with leftover pork from the day before. Come day’s end, the red beans had gone soft, ready to be served with one of Louisiana’s finest crops: rice. Over the decades, red beans and rice became anytime food, especially for celebrations. You see it at birthdays and funerals. You bring it for Mardi Gras, that party to beat all parties.

New Orleans isn’t the only place with a thing for red beans. There’s rajma, a creamy red bean stew from Punjab, and gallopinto, a rice-and-beans dish that’s ubiquitous in Nicaragua. In Spain’s Basque country, it’s alubias con sacramentos.

Last September, my boyfriend and I drove through parts of the Spanish Basque country. We hiked Mount Adarra, passing rows of cows as we crested the summit and looked out over the half-moon-shaped Bay of Biscay and the city of San Sebastián. After our descent, we drank cider and ate plates of boiled meats, tortilla Española and cheesy croquetas at a Basque cider house, called an erretegia. My Basque friend, Gontzal, chaperoned us from bar to bar, eating the local version of tapas called pintxos. Gontzal even cooked for us—fresh anchovies, an omelet with salt cod, and sautéed guindillas (mild green peppers).

It was only when we returned home to New Orleans and I started digging into Alexandra Raij’s The Basque Book that I realized all the foods Brandon and I missed while we were in Spain: marmitako (fisherman’s stew), lamb meatballs with fresh peas, the Basque version of ratatouille called pisto. That’s always how it is with travel. You don’t realize what you didn’t know until you know it.

Making ribs manageable. 📷: Denny Culbert

While paging through the book, I noticed remarkable similarities between Raij’s recipe for Basque red beans and the ubiquitous red beans of my adopted home. New Orleans–style red beans are a Creole dish. Basque red beans, with their allotment of two kinds of sausage, a glut of other pork products, and the obligatory reliance on a vinegary, chile-hot condiment, were already singing in the key of Cajun. I wondered if I could prepare these beans the Basque way, with the addition of some porky Louisiana soul.

I had freezer stock from two of Cajun country’s best butchers: smoked pork sausage from Chop’s Specialty Meats, and boudin, that Cajun pork-and-rice sausage staple, from Billy’s Boudin & Cracklins. I used those in place of the recipe’s chorizo and blood sausage. I added ribs and tasso (southern Louisiana spiced smoked pork) in place of jamón Serrano.

I didn’t have washing to do the day I made the beans. I did get distracted, though, and let them cook longer than I intended. Some of them turned pulpy. This means the beans’ texture was a lot like Popeye’s red beans. This is not a problem, because Popeye’s red beans are mighty good.

There’s no point in making a small amount of red beans and rice. I gave some to our neighbors across the street, as you do down this way, and my boyfriend and I still had red beans for days. Turns out every day is a good day when every day feels like a New Orleans Monday.

Adapted from The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij, Eder Montero and Rebecca Flint Marx

In this recipe, you want dried chiles that aren’t too hot. Guajillos or New Mexican chiles would be ideal. If you want to un-Louisiana the dish, you could substitute prosciutto for the tasso and chorizo and/or blood sausage for the boudin and smoked pork sausage. I think you get the idea—there are lots of ways to play with this recipe.

Cajun-Basque Red Beans

Serve 6–8
Adapted from The Basque Book by Alexandra Raij, Eder Montero and Rebecca Flint Marx

• 1 pound dried red beans

• 1 large onion, unpeeled, ends cut off

• 1 leek, white and green parts only

• 1 carrot, peeled

• 1 head of garlic, unpeeled, top cut off

• 1 bay leaf

• 3 sprigs of thyme

• 2 dried chiles, stems and seeds removed

• 1 small head green cabbage, cut in half through the stem

• 2 ounces tasso

• 2 pounds pork ribs, in one piece (baby back is ideal)

• kosher salt

• 1-2 boudin links

• 1-2 smoked pork sausage links

• ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 6 cloves garlic, sliced very thin

• jar of small, thin pickled green peppers (like pepperoncini)

• Cooked long-grain rice, for serving

1. In a large stockpot, combine the beans, onion, leek, carrot, garlic, bay leaf, thyme, dried chiles, half the cabbage, tasso, ribs, and a couple tablespoons salt. Cover with about 6 inches of water and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about an hour and a half. Add the boudin and smoked sausage and cook for 20 minutes. Remove the ribs, boudin, and smoked sausage and let cool. Then cut the ribs, boudin, and sausages into 6 to 8 pieces each.

2. Continue cooking the beans until they’re tender. This could take another hour and a half or so.

3. Meanwhile, bring a medium saucepan of salted water to a boil. Cut the remaining cabbage into thin strips and boil until the strips are tender, about 6 minutes. Drain well and transfer to a plate.

4. When the beans are tender, remove the garlic, cabbage, tasso, leek, thyme sprigs, bay leaf, and any large chile pieces. Remove the onion and carrot, peel the onion and add the peeled onion and carrot to a blender. Add about a cup of the beans and bean broth to the blender and blend until smooth. Return the pureed beans to the pot. Cook for another 10 minutes to allow the puree to meld with the other beans. Taste and season with salt.

5. In a small saucepan, add the oil and garlic and warm over medium-low heat until the garlic turns just golden. Add half the garlic and oil to the beans and pour the rest over the cabbage.

6. Serve the beans with the reserved meat, pickled peppers, and cabbage. You can reheat the meat in a 300℉ oven for 10 minutes or so. Serve with rice.

The Best Californian Food I Ever Ate Was Indian | RECIPE

This story originally appeared on TASTE.

I’m a child of California. I love a salad. I love avocado toast. I love a carne asada taco served on a double layer of warm corn tortillas. From a restaurant, from a truck. It does not matter. I also love all the ways in which the iconic restaurants of northern and southern California—the Chez Panisses and Zuni Cafés of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Lucques and Spagos of Los Angeles—have put the state’s unique and vast bounty to use in dishes inspired by the traditions of France and Italy.

But none of those celebrated temples of high gastronomy have changed my understanding of the transformative power of freshness, that linchpin of California cooking, like the cooking of Niloufer Ichaporia King has. It first happened at a meal offered once a year at that keystone of California cuisine Chez Panisse. Later, King’s book, My Bombay Kitchen, would become a kind of rulebook in my own kitchen.

When I lived in San Francisco, the region’s savviest cooks, food writers, and diners stammered, with stars flickering in their eyes, anytime King was discussed. Every year for Nowruz, the Persian New Year celebrated on the spring equinox, King would take over the kitchen at Chez Panisse for one night. The meal was a set menu. A not-cheap one. I went.

This was in the late 2000s. Probably 2007. I don’t remember the exact dishes I ate. I was no doubt hungover before the meal. And after. (That’s just how that period in my life was.) But that one dinner shifted my thinking—and my cooking. Her food slapped me awake. I had eaten a lot of Indian food in restaurants in the U.S. Some dosas and uttapam at south Indian restaurants, a whole lot of chicken tikka masala, stewed okra and naan at north Indian spots. King’s food was a swerve. The ginger, the garlic, the cilantro, the lime, the heady spices: all there. Her cooking tasted like that other food’s snappy cousin. Same bloodline but with a clean shave, a pressed shirt, and handsome shoes.

I ate King’s Nowruz dinner at Chez Panisse again the following year, and around that time her cookbook was published. It captures everything about why her food is so singular, so influential on my own cooking.

The sharp pop of fresh ginger and lime in a cucumber salad. Fish fillets slapped with a coconut-herb chutney and steamed in banana leaves. A sweet and fiery tomato chutney.

Me, cooking it up. 📷: Denny Culbert

King’s lineage comprises Parsi, emigrants to India who left Persia centuries ago because of religious persecution. Parsi food exists at the intersection of Iranian and Indian. It’s a cuisine that’s lavish and humble, delicate and forceful.

It’s also a food culture obsessed with eggs. And potato chips—or as Parsis call them, wafers. If you love two foods that much, why not combine them? The Parsis have, with particular joy. They call it wafer par ida. Sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

You cook onions and fresh chiles and then add cilantro. You could add chopped ginger and garlic, too. You don’t have to. But you should. Then you destroy a few handfuls of potato chips with your fists and toss them in. Crack eggs into the pan and cook until the eggs are set. That’s it. Part of the allure of this recipe is its ease. Better still, the recipe harnesses the ability of fresh ginger, garlic, chile, and cilantro to transfigure a dish that could be satisfying but also one-dimensional into something truly transcendental.

Yes, you want this for a stabilizing meal the morning after a debaucherous night—which is most nights in New Orleans, where I live. Yes, you want this if/when you are stoned. Yes, you want this pretty much anytime.

Or I certainly do, at least. Because it reminds me of the power of one meal to steer a lifetime.

Parsi Eggs With Potato Chips
Adapted from Niloufer Ichaporia King’s My Bombay Kitchen

The ginger and garlic aren’t required—I didn’t use them the last time I made this, which is the dish you see in the photo. It’s a good—make that great—idea to add them, though. Still, neither you nor the dish will suffer if you omit them. Also, be sure to use a newly opened bag of chips. For that fresh chip flavor and crunch, of course.

INGREDIENTS
A tablespoon or two of butter or vegetable oil—or a mix of the two
1 small onion, chopped
2-3 hot fresh chiles, finely chopped
1 small garlic clove, grated
¼-inch piece ginger, peeled and grated or finely chopped (optional)
About ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro
1 cup of plain potato chips
4 eggs

DIRECTIONS
1. Warm the oil over medium heat in a large skillet. When hot, add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until it softens but hasn’t browned.

2. Add the chiles, garlic, and ginger (if using). Cook until fragrant, just a minute or so. Add most of the cilantro (reserving some for garnish) and the potato chips and stir gently, making sure not to crush the chips.

3. Now make four holes in the chip mixture. Crack an egg into each of the holes. Dribble a tablespoon or so of water around the edge of the skillet and cover with a lid. Cook until the eggs’ whites are set, 2-3 minutes. Garnish with the remaining cilantro and serve immediately.