Is there anything more delicious than crispy pork, eggs, pasta and cheese? Carbonara just may be my favourite way to eat breakfast foods at dinner. The very first time I heard about carbonara, I was in my late teens. I was working at a deli/bakery, and my manager was a super-sweet Italian woman who would chat with me about all the delicious Italian dishes she would cook for her husband, two sons and daughter.

One day, she told me she made carbonara for dinner. I told her I’d never heard of it and put her in some major shock. I know now that carbonara is a classic Italian dish, but at the time, I hadn’t really explored Italian cuisine. Sheri, my manager, took it upon herself to teach me the ways of carbonara.

“It’s simple,” she said, “put the spaghetti on the stove, and while that’s cooking, fry up some bacon in a pan until crispy. Crack an egg or two into a bowl and add some romano and lots of black pepper. When the spaghetti’s done, drain it, and toss the hot pasta with the eggs and cheese then add the bacon.”

It sounded easy enough and to a bacon and egg lover like me, I had to try it immediately. What Sheri didn’t mention was the fact that carbonara making is a lesson in timing. My first attempt was sort of a bacon and scrambled egg pasta. Delicious, but nothing like the creamy sauce I’d heard about. It took me a while, but I managed to figure it out.

This Marcella Hazan carbonara recipe is pretty good. I love the flavour you get from the garlic and deglazing with white wine.

Marcella Hazan’s Carbonara Recipe from labellecuisine.com

1/4 pound pancetta
2 garlic cloves
1.5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons dry white wine
1 large egg
2 tablespoons freshly grated Romano cheese
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon chopped flat-leaf parsley
280 grams spaghetti

Start by boiling a pot of water and then cooking your pasta according to the package. Time it so that everything else is prepared by the time the pasta is cooked.

Cut the pancetta into strips not quite 1/4 inch wide. Lightly crush the garlic with a knife handle, enough to split it and loosen the skin, which you will discard. Put the garlic and olive oil into a small sauté pan and turn on the heat to medium high. Sauté until the garlic becomes coloured a deep gold and remove. Fry the pancetta until it starts to crisp at the edges. Add the wine and let it bubble for a minute or two and then turn off the heat.

Break the egg into big enough to toss the pasta in. Beat it lightly with a fork, then add the two grated cheeses, a liberal grinding of pepper, and the chopped parsley. Mix thoroughly. Add cooked drained spaghetti to the bowl, and toss rapidly,
coating the strands well. Add the entire contents of the bacon pan into the bowl, toss thoroughly again, and enjoy at once.

Do you guys remember when McDonald’s used to have scrambled eggs for breakfast? They’d come in one of those flip top styrofoam containers and the eggs would be rubbery and usually cold. When I was a kid, strange as this may sound, those eggs were my breakfast of choice on the rare occasion we had McDonald’s for breakfast.

The eggs weren’t good, and I know that now, but to my young, undiscerning palate, they were eggs and eggs equalled deliciousness. I still love eggs, but scrambling wasn’t a preferred method until Mike made me scrambled eggs one day.

He came across a video of Gordon Ramsay making eggs and he gave it a go. The result was creamy, rich and delicate. Ramsay’s egg cooking method is on the heat, off the heat, on the heat, off the heat. Eggs can overcook in an instant, so constantly moving the eggs around and moving them on and off the heat ensures that the eggs won’t turn rubbery.

I know everyone has their own way of making scrambled eggs and I’m pretty sure by now you’ve found your way of cooking your perfect scrambled eggs, but give this a try, you might surprise yourself!

Gordon Ramsay’s Scrambled Egg Recipe adapted from Lifehacker

3 eggs
1.5 tablespoons of butter, cut into small pieces
sea salt and fresh ground pepper
thinly sliced green onion
2 slices of bread

Break the eggs into a cold saucepan and place on medium low heat. Add the butter and stir. Stir constantly, like making a risotto. As the eggs start to set a bit, remove the pan from the heat and keep stirring. Keep moving the eggs between the heat and off the heat until the eggs almost hold their shape. They eggs will be quite tender. Toast the bread. When the eggs are done, season, stir in the green onions and put on top of the toast and enjoy immediately.

I love pavlova; the crisp shattering shell that gives way to soft, gooey marshmallow insides gets me every time. I absolutely cannot have pavlova in the house, just because I can (and will) consume the entire thing.

Pavlova’s fantastic because you’ll get a couple of oohs and ahhs when you bring it out, but the secret is it’s really, really simple to make. My current favourite is a combination of dark chocolate and delicious farm fresh raspberries.

I made this for a birthday celebration dinner for my brother and my two-year-old nephew was so entranced by the pile of ruby red raspberries that he dragged a stool over to the countertop where it was sitting to look at it (and beg for raspberries of course)

Luckily we got to it before he ate all the raspberries off. The magic in this dessert is the contrast in textures and flavours. Fresh softly whipped cream tempers the sweetness of the meringue and the dark chocolate adds a hint of bitterness.

Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova Recipe adapted from nigella.com

serves 6-8

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
30 grams dark chocolate, roughly chopped

1 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
2 pints raspberries

Preheat the oven to 350˚F and line a baking tray with baking parchment.
Beat the egg whites until satiny peaks form, and then beat in the sugar a spoonful at a time until the meringue is stiff and shiny. Sprinkle over the cocoa and the chopped chocolate. Gently fold everything until the cocoa is thoroughly mixed in. Mound on to a baking sheet in a circle approximately 8 inches in diameter, smoothing the sides and top. Place in the oven, then immediately turn the temperature down to 300˚F and bake for about one to one and a quarter hours. When it’s ready it should look crisp around the edges and on the sides and be dry on top, but when you poke the centre you should feel a give beneath your fingers. Turn off the oven and open the door slightly, and let the chocolate meringue disc cool completely.

When you’re ready to serve, invert on to a big, flat-bottomed plate. Whisk the cream till thick but still soft and pile it on top of the meringue, then scatter the raspberries and enjoy.

Now that we’re in the thick of barbecue season – though you wouldn’t know it in cloudy Vancouver – all my favourite summertime recipes are making a comeback. There’s nothing better than potato salad with sticky pieces of barbecue right off the grill.

Potato salad screams summer to me, even though it’s ingredients aren’t necessarily summer produce. Still, I find the nugget potatoes in the summer creamier, sweeter and more full of flavour.

The potatoes are the star in this recipe, but I also toss in a bit of chopped bacon. The bacon just helps add a bit of extra, well, bacon-iness. This recipe will make quite a bit of potato salad, which is good if you’re heading to a big barbecue, but bad if you’re just by yourself. Feel free to scale the recipe.

Summery Potato-Bacon Salad Recipe

2 lbs nugget potatoes, skin on and scrubbed (I used Yukon Gold nuggets)
3 eggs
6 slices of bacon
1 1/2 cups of diced celery
1 bunch green onions, sliced
5 tablespoons mayonnaise or to taste
3 tablespoons whole grain mustard or to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Hard-boil the eggs, peel, cool, dice and set aside. Chop the bacon into and cook over medium to medium high heat until the fat is rendered out and the bacon is crispy. Drain on paper towels. While the bacon is cooking, boil the potatoes in a large pot of water with a sprinkling of salt. When they are just tender, drain. If you like, cool the potatoes in cold water and peel off the skins. If you like potato skins, skip this step. Quarter the potatoes.

One all the ingredients are cool, combine the quartered potatoes, diced eggs, bacon, celery and green onions in a bowl. Add the mayonnaise and whole grain mustard. Mix well. Taste and add more mayonnaise or mustard if necessary. Season with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until chilled then enjoy!

My favourite sushi restaurant makes a fantastic tamago-yaki. While we sit at the sushi bar and watch the chefs making sushi, I always eye the big golden yellow block of tamago. Their tamago is perfect: solid, yet still layered, with no burnt parts. Mike likes to judge sushi restaurants by their saba/mackerel sushi, but I use tamago as my benchmark.

Tamago is a little tricky to make at home because you want the layers of egg to adhere to each other, but you don’t want any browning because the pieces of sliced tamago should be a uniform yellow colour. I have a cheap tamago pan that I bought at a Korean grocery store, but I’ve seen people make tamago without a rectangle pan, so I know it’s possible.

Tamago Recipe

3 eggs
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon light soy sauce

Crack your eggs and lightly mix them. You don’t want to incorporate air into them so the best way is to use chopsticks: stir them gently without whipping, but make sure that the eggs and yolks are completely homogeneous. Add the mirin, sugar and soy and gently mix in.

Use a paper towel to evenly spread a bit of oil in your pan. Heat it on medium low heat, then add the eggs so they cover the bottom of the pan.

After 2-3 minutes, the egg will start to cook and solidify. The eggs don’t need to be entirely cooked, in fact, they should be a tiny bit moist on top so that the egg sticks to itself. Using chopsticks or a spatula, fold the egg over onto itself twice, like how you would fold a letter into thirds. Don’t flip the eggs, just push them to the end of the pan.

Use your oily paper towel to spread a tiny bit more oil in the pan and add a bit more of the eggs. Lift up the log of already cooked eggs so that the raw eggs are touching them. When the new layer of egg is almost cooked, fold the eggs over onto themselves again. Repeat until all the eggs are used.

Wrap in saran wrap and using a sushi mat, press the tamago into a rectangle shape. Let cool completely, slice and enjoy!

I know I say “I’ve never” a lot, but it’s true every time, and especially true this time: I’ve never made traditional consommé. Oh sure, I’ve tried the gelatin clarification method, but I’ve never done it egg-raft-style.

I guess kimchi flavoured consommé is hardly “traditional,” but even if the flavour is new, the method isn’t. I actually didn’t enjoy the kimchi consommé when I made it for the oysters in the Ssäm Bar chapter, but I’m hoping that the Ko kimchi consommé with pork belly, oysters and napa cabbage redeems kimchi consommé for me permanently.

Consommé is standard French broth made from clarifying stock flavoured with ground meats and mirepoix. Egg whites are stirred into cold stock and heated up slowy. When done properly, the egg whites, which are water-soluble, will have coated all the tiny floaties. When cooked, the egg whites come together in a raft, pulling together all the impurities and leaving you with a super-clear stock.

In theory all this sounds fine and dandy, but in practice, well, let’s just say I thought the floaty cloud of egg whites looked good hanging out on top of the stock. Because I didn’t stir the whites into the cold liquid, they didn’t really get a chance to coat the puréed kimchi and clarify the stock. Basically I cooked myself a lovely ground pork egg meringue mess. No worries though, because after straining through a paper towel, the stock ended up being pretty clear.

I had a tiny taste and this consommé is world’s away from the gelatin clarified one. I don’t know if it’s because of the added ground pork or the ramen broth base, but this consommé is infinitely better. It’s deeper, more complex and more robust. It kind of tastes like a super-refined kimchi stew. I can’t wait to put it together with the pork belly and oysters.

Other parts of this dish to come: pork belly for Ko kimchi consommé.

When you’re feeling peckish and your have old rice in the fridge, fried rice is the way to go. It’s fast to make and even faster to eat. If you’re lacking fresh ingredients, just take a look at what leftovers you have languishing away. I’ve made fried rice with leftover barbecue meat, deli meat leftovers, and even just eggs and rice.

Yesterday, I had a fierce craving for fried rice, but I didn’t have any rice or suitable fried rice ingredients in the fridge, so I did the cardinal sin: I made fried rice with fresh rice. If you’ve ever made fried rice with fresh rice you know that it usually turns into a wet mess. The best thing you can do is spread your rice out to let it cool down. Once it’s cold and therefore more dry, you can usually fry it up just fine.

I didn’t have any meat in the fridge, so I just fried my rice with eggs and a bit of XO sauce. The XO sauce has been hanging out in the fridge for a while, just begging to be used in fried rice.

A friend once told me how some young thugs tried to make fun of him:

Thugs: You Chinese, you eat flied lice!
My Friend: Yeah, I do eat fried rice, you have a problem with that?

I guess the thugs didn’t have anything else to say because they just left.

XO Fried Rice Recipe

2 cups of day-old cooked rice
3 tablespoons of XO sauce
1/4 cup sliced green onions
2 eggs, lightly beaten
oil
salt and pepper to taste

Heat your wok or frying pan over high heat and add a tiny bit of oil and scramble your lightly beaten eggs until mostly set, but not over cooked. The eggs will cook a bit more when you fry all the ingredients together. Remove the eggs from the wok and set aside.

Add a tiny bit more oil to the wok and add the fry and fry it, stirring occasionally until all the clumps are broken down and the rice is heated, about five minutes.

Add the XO sauce and continue frying until it mixed completely. Put the eggs back in the wok along with the green onions. Stir to mix, season to taste and serve immediately.

I love eating at Japanese izakayas: drinking holes that serve small share plates that you munch on while drinking copious amounts of alcohol. There’s quite an izakaya scene in Vancouver and the food they serve is some of my favourite. Most izakayas usually have a small variety of sashimi (hardly sushi); yakitori and kushiyaki; noodle and rice dishes; and tonnes of deep-fried goodness. A lot of the food is innovative, cheap and delicious.

Since the plates are small you can order 5-6 dishes for 2 people, which allows you a lot of variety. Inevitably, one of the dishes I will order is korokke. If you’ve never had korokke, you’re missing out. Crisp, panko-ed outsides, soft, fluffy mashed potato insides studded with meat, corn and onions, they’re kind of like a deep-fried shepherd’s pie. Korokke comes in all different sizes and varieties.

One of the popular izakayas, Guu, has a signature dish: kobocha korokke. It’s a whole boiled egg inside a kobocha croquette. The Guu kabocha korokke is simple, but so tasty. The sweetness of the kabocha with their thousand island-type Japanese mayonnaise dressing is seriously addictive. Throw a boiled egg in and it’s an unforgettable dish.

I learned about the kabocha korokke even before I ever knew what an izakaya was. At the time I was working at a daycare, chatting to my co-worker about what she had done the night before. She mentioned she went to a really cool Japanese restaurant and had this amazing deep-fried pumpkin and egg dish. Honestly, it didn’t sound great to me, but I took her word for it and checked out the restaurant, which was Guu.

Guu blew me away with it’s energetic atmosphere, cheerful yelling servers and of course, the food. All it took was the one visit; I was hooked. Since then, I’ve been to all the izakaya offerings in Vancouver. I haven’t made much izakaya food at home, but quail eggs caught my eye at the grocery store, and somehow ended up being mini-fied versions of Guu’s kabocha korokke, but with acorn squash.

The mini acorn squash korokke were fantastic. The acorn squash was sweet and nutty and the quail eggs were delicate and delicious. Mike liked these better than the Guu version, but I still think Guu does them better!

Acorn Squash Egg Korokke Recipe

1 small acorn squash
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

9 hard-boiled and peeled quail eggs

2 tablespoons of flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup panko

oil for deep-frying

Cut the acorn squash in half and drizzle with the olive oil and sprinkle on salt and pepper. Bake at 400˚F for 45 minutes or until tender. Cool and then scoop out the flesh and mash. Taste and season. If the squash feels to wet to form, add a bit of panko to bind it together.

Take about 2 tablespoons of squash and enclose the quail egg by shaping the squash into a ball. Roll the korokke in flour, egg and then panko. Repeat until you have 9 korokke.

Heat up oil to 375˚F and deep-fry until golden brown, about 2 minutes. Remove, drain on paper towels and serve hot with Kewpie mayonnaise and Japanese mustard.

Momofuku Ko is Chang’s tiny 12 seat, impossible-to-get reservations only, no menu, omakase-style restaurant created to showcase technique. Last summer, I had the chance to take three hours out of my day to have the Ko lunch menu, and if someone told me I’d be attempting to create their plates of perfection, I would have fallen over laughing.

The clean, sure, precision cooking that we saw behind the counter at Ko is not something I can recreate at home, but Chang does a great job of demystifying his Ko dishes.

One of his signature dishes is the amazing soft-cooked egg hen’s egg. The creaminess of the runny egg, the luxurious sweet butter-cooked onions, the salty caviar and the crunchy fresh made chips are fantastic together.

Chang has runny eggs down to a pat with his 5:10 method. Water is brought to a boil and eggs straight from the fridge are gently lowered in and cooked for exactly 5 minutes, 10 seconds, then plunged into an ice-bath and peeled underwater.

The egg is plated atop a bed of onion soubise, with a side of chips and herb salad. When you slice into the egg, a glorious mess of yellow yolk will spill out as a backdrop for the caviar.

It was really fun making this dish at home, and it’s definitely one of the more accessible dishes to make. It would make a nice fancy little one-bite appetizer if you topped chips with halves of soft-boiled quails eggs topped with a tiny bit of onion soubise, caviar and a leaf of parsley.

Savoury steamed egg custards are fairly common in Asian cuisine: the Chinese have steamed eggs; the Koreans have gaeran jim; and the Japanese have chawan mushi. All three dishes are similar in preparation and taste, yet vastly different.

My mom used to make steamed eggs a lot when we were kids; it’s a standard at home-style Chinese meals. It fast, easy and was one of the dishes that we would unfailingly eat.

Everyone has a different way of making steamed eggs: my mom would add a little bit of ground pork and a couple of salted duck eggs. My brother and I would eat around the duck eggs, leaving little orange islands in our wake. Eating a bowl of rice topped with steamed egg reminds me of childhood in the best way. It was and still is one of my favourite comfort foods.

The first time I tried to steam my own eggs it was an ultimate fail. I was in high school and for some reason or other my parents weren’t home so I was making my own dinner. It started out promising: I gently scrambled my eggs the way my mom did, added salt and water and set the whole dish in a wok to boil over high heat. When I opened the lid, my eggs looked like something out of a horror movie. They were bubbly, grey and somehow managed to grow into a strange egg mass that was trying to crawl out of the pan. Not one to waste food, I gave it a try, but it was rubbery and un-soy-sauce-savable, so I left it on the counter to show my mom and ask what went wrong.

When she came home that night she laughed at me for a good fifteen minutes. Turns out you’re not supposed to steam eggs on high heat. There are tonnes of tips out there on how to make perfectly smooth steamed eggs.

If you’ve never had steamed eggs, you’re missing out. The smooth, silky texture is akin to soft tofu, but more savoury and creamy. The Japanese version of steamed egg, chawan mushi is usually made with dashi for a more complex umami flavour.

I found a Chang recipe on foodandwine.com for chawan mushi topped with shiitakes and crab meat. I switched it up a little bit, omitting the cashews and substituting prawns for crab meat. I also didn’t use instant dashi powder, which may be why my custard was not seasoned enough. Strangely enough there is no seasoning in this recipe, so feel free to serve it with soy sauce.

Chawan Mushi Recipe adapted from foodandwine.com

2 cups of dashi
3 large eggs
8 large cooked prawns (I shelled, de-viened and boiled them gently until cooked)
4 small shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and very thinly sliced
1 green onion cut into matchsticks

In a medium bowl, using chopsticks, very gently stir the eggs until blended, without incorporating too much air. Stir in the dashi, then strain the mixture into a measuring cup.

Divide the egg mixture between 4 shallow 1-cup bowls and wrap each bowl in plastic. Preheat a steamer. Add the bowls to the steamer and turn the heat down to medium low. The water should be at a gentle simmer. Steam for 15-20 minutes or until the eggs are set.

Immediately transfer the bowls to the refrigerator to chill for at least 3 hours or overnight.

Unwrap the custards. Top with the prawns, shiitakes and green onions and serve.