Yes, We Like Eggs.

And meat, too.

Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?

I popped open a new carton of pastured eggs this morning and this is what I found:

Looks painful.

Breakfast of Champions

Poached eggs and a pile of bacon.

And the best part? The kids turned down the waffles.

[UPDATED: I should clarify that we were at a restaurant (Calafia in Palo Alto). We don't keep waffles in the house!]

Lucky Peach's Egg Chart

How awesome is this chart of sous vide temperatures for eggs? This chart alone justifies the $10 price tag on the inaugural issue of David Chang's Lucky Peach magazine.

Click the image above for the full chart.

Good Morning

My breakfast was incredibly easy (even for me!) to throw together: savory coconut pancakes (just three ingredients: egg, coconut flour and salt) topped with bacon (cooked in the microwave) and avocado. It took less than five minutes to throw together.

I'm downing all the bacon I can before the Whole9 crew tells me I have to stop.

And if you haven't guessed yet, I'm not fasting through the morning every day anymore. More on that later...

I Love Eggs, But...

...I think I'll pass on these:

No, not 'cause they're green.

Because they're boiled in the urine of Chinese schoolboys.

[Source]

A Simple Guide to Eggs

Check out the full infographic over at Culinaut.

[Source]

I Told You Sandwiches are Offensive

As a dyed-in-the-wool Paleo eater, I find sandwiches generally distasteful. But even if you don't eat like I do, I'm guessing your eyebrows would shoot up if you flipped open a menu and saw sandwiches named "Gay Boy" and "The Illegal."

I think it's safe to say that this particular restaurant owner isn't fond of non-meat eaters. Or Mexicans.

Still, I'm left scratching my head. The Gay Garden Boy sandwich clearly aspires to veganism -- so why throw an egg in there? And why is it more expensive than the other sandwiches? Is vegetarianism the critical distinction between a Butter Face and a Foxi Lady? If so, why would avoiding meat give you a hot body and an ugly face? Is a "white egg" supposed to be the same as an "egg white"?

These are the kinds of questions that keep me up at night.

(Source: Buzzfeed)

A Modern Stone Age Family Indeed

To the outside world, the Flintstones appeared to be enjoying a perfectly Paleo lifestyle. They ate eggs:

And meat:

They moved around a lot:

And lifted heavy things:

But brace yourselves: Mounting evidence suggests that the Flintstones weren't, in fact, as Paleo-compliant as we have been led to believe. Believe ir or not, research indicates that they ingested all sorts of NEOLITHIC AGENTS OF DISEASE!

Consider, for example, this!





And this!

And this!

And this!

And this!

And this!

And this!



Let's hope Captain Caveman was better about hewing closer to an ancestral diet. Otherwise, I swear I'm going to stop watching (as many) Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Animal Planet Plate Lunch

What -- you didn't believe that I'd actually go eat a big plate of animals for lunch?

Every Tuesday, I head over to the Ferry Building Farmer's Market's Prather Ranch stand for a Farmhouse Burger -- beef patty, ham, bacon, fried egg, no bun, extra lettuce, and a pile of fresh sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when I feel like something a little lighter, I add slaw:

But today, I just polished off the meat with a side of homemade venison jerky.

I love animals.

Stop With The Egg Whites

The New Yorker's food issue is out this week, and it features a lengthy piece about April Broomfield, the chef/owner of NYC's The Spotted Pig and The Breslin -- both of which are awesome for meat-lovin' Paleo eaters like me. Last month, M and I hit The Breslin for brunch, and ordered two full English breakfast plates, piled high with porky goodness, and with no beans or toast to spoil the fun.

We clearly did not do an adequate job of educating one of our brunch companions about the place, though. And as I mentioned in a previous post, he's not on the Paleo train. After scouring the menu in vain for something -- anything! -- that the USDA Food Pyramid and conventional dietary wisdom would smile upon, he asked our server whether the vegetable frittata could be made with egg whites. "No," she replied.

Of course, the server's intent wasn't to steer him towards better health. Chances are, she subscribes to the same beliefs that most people hold about the dangers of egg yolks and saturated fats and everything else on The Breslin's menu. I seriously doubt she's read Gary Taubes.

But you know who has? Director/producer/screenwriter/novelist Nora Ephron. She most certainly would not have asked for fucking egg whites.

Ephron was being interviewed by Michael Krazny on NPR's "Forum" this morning. I know next to nothing about Nora Ephron, other than that she wrote "When Harry Met Sally" or something, so I was only half-listening -- until Krazny gently chided her about her position on eggs and cholesterol. My ears perked up.

"Eating the cholesterol in eggs doesn't raise your blood cholesterol!" she countered. Krasny shot back that the Mayo Clinic says she's wrong. She stuck to her guns. And she happens to be right.

Here's what I dug up from an old HuffPo blog post of Ephron's on the subject:

[D]ietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: you can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and cheese and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?

Which brings me to the point of this piece: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. 

According to yesterday's New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're participants in something known as an informational cascade, which turns out to be a fabulous expression for something that everyone thinks must be true because so many reputable people say it is. In this case, of course, it's not an informational cascade but a misinformational cascade, and as a result, way too many people I know have been brainwashed into thinking that whole-egg omelettes are bad for you.

So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette.

Hear, hear.

David H. Freedman wrote in this month's Atlantic about how the health studies you hear about on the news are almost universally fraught with error and bias -- and then the information cascade takes over and we go flying off the cliff with all the other lemmings. So what happens when another study comes out and draws the opposite conclusion -- which, by the way, happens ALL THE TIME?

Too late. We're already in freefall -- and we didn't even get to enjoy the frittata with the awesomely delicious egg yolks.

Momofuku's 5:10 Eggs

Don't speak to me about the dangers of runny eggs. I love them. In fact, for the past few weeks, I've been itching to boil up a batch of soft-cooked eggs. After watching the chefs at Momofuku Ko plate and cut open perfectly soft-cooked hen eggs (served with hackleback caviar, onion soubise and fingerling potato chips), I've wanted to give it a shot, too.

But while some brave souls have recreated David Chang's entire dish at home, I ain't nearly that intrepid. Nor, frankly, do I have two hours to devote to stirring a pot of onion soubise. And potato chips aren't Paleo.

The Momofuku cookbook's recipe for just the soft-cooked eggs, however, is fast and simple, and the eggs can be added to just about any dish.

5:10 Eggs

• Boil a big pot of water.
• Gently lower a bunch of large eggs into the boiling water.
• Exactly 5 minutes and 10 seconds later, carefully transfer the eggs to an ice bath (a.k.a. a big bowl of ice water).
• Gently crack each egg and peel 'em in the bowl, under the water.
• Handle the eggs carefully -- they should feel like little water balloons encased in jelly.
• Keep them in the fridge until you're ready to eat (up to 8 hours). Right before serving, warm the eggs under hot running tap water for a minute. (Optional: Smoke the eggs! Add a few drops of liquid smoke to a large container of water, place the peeled eggs in the container, and refrigerate for a few hours.)
• When ready to serve, split each egg open with a small knife, allowing the gooey yolk to ooze onto the other food on your plate, thereby rendering everything super-awesomely delicious.

Tonight, M whipped up a quick dinner using a mishmash of stuff we had on hand in our fridge and pantry: Bratwurst, heirloom tomatoes, avocado, broccoli. It was tasty -- and also a perfect opportunity for me to throw in a soft-cooked egg.

Here's how the eggs looked post-peeling:

And on my dinner plate, after being sliced open:

Going into this, I was a bit skeptical that 5:10 was the precise cooking time needed to set the egg white while keeping the yellow center liquid. But I'll be damned: This recipe works perfectly.

I couldn't be in Philly to watch the Giants clinch the National League pennant tonight, but I did polish off a celebratory bratwurst in their honor. Coating the sausage with the gooey yolk of a 5:10 egg made it taste even better.