Mandajuice

Recipe for Eggs Baked in Jelly Jars

I need to start by saying that every time I make baked eggs, I pull out Joel's copy of Mastering the Art of French Cuisine just so I can double check my oven temperature (375 degrees). I owe this (and many, many other delicious ideas) to Julia Child.

But this is my version and through the process of trial and error, I figured out some things that are NOT in Julia's original recipe and that you should DEFINITELY KNOW if you want to get this one right.

First off, don't waste your money on fancy schmancy "ramekins." The perfect vessel for a baked egg is an 8 oz Kerr wide-mouth jelly jar. You can buy them for under a dollar each (and then use them for food storage!) (They're the perfect size for putting mac 'n cheese in your kids lunch box!) (And unlike tupperware, these jars are 100% microwave, oven and dishwasher safe AND you can use them to make jelly.) Also, they're pretty much perfectly Portland chic.

You'll also need some eggs. One to two per person. If you happen to have access to FRESH, FREE-RANGE eggs, you will love this recipe times a gazillion. (Baked eggs are VERY RICH, so one egg per person is usually plenty...)

You can see from the photo above that my chickens are being COMPLETE BRATS. Lucy (the gray chicken who lays the white eggs) is producing 1-2 eggs a day. In spite of the fact that she can LITERALLY fly out of the coop and has been doing so every day just to eat my vegetable garden starts, she is totally my favorite chicken.The other two chickens aren't worth their weight in feed. The Queen Bitch (Teri) (whose sister, Yaki, died before we moved in) only lays one ENORMOUS egg a month (in spite of eating 80% of the food) and her second in command (Zola) is only laying two-three times a week. Let's just say as soon as the baby Americaunas start laying, Zola and Teri are gonna make for some delicious soup!

Anyway, to make baked eggs, you absolutely need the following ingredients:

EGGS (one to two per person) (If you don't have chickens, spring for the most expensive, most local, most organic, most brightly colored, most free-range eggs you can find. I would never EVER say this about milk, but it's true for eggs.)

Butter

Heavy Cream

From there you can add virtually ANYTHING YOU WANT. We've added everything from prosciutto to spinach and never been disappointed. (Even with piss-poor production, we still get a lot of eggs.)

My favorite combo is the one pictured above: bacon, parmesan cheese, asparagus (and/or fresh spinach). And shallots. I like shallots. A lot.

Before I go any further, I should tell you the two big secrets that Julia Child forgot to add to her original recipe:

1) Your eggs should be ROOM TEMPERATURE. We're freaky about eggs in this country, but the truth is they don't actually need to be refrigerated as much as we think they do. If you're lucky and ALL THREE of your hens lay in one day, you can just go out and grab those eggs while they're still warm and they'll be IDEAL for this recipe.

2) HEAT UP THE CREAM. Don't boil it, but get it as hot as possible without doing so.

Start by preheating your oven to 375 degrees and filling an oven-proof skillet with enough water so that after you add all your jelly jars, the water is about 3/4 of an inch deep. Butter your jelly jars and plop them in the water. Get that water simmering and then add about a tablespoon of cream to each jar.

I like to heat up my cream with a little bit of parmesan cheese, some white or green pepper and a dash of nutmeg, but that's totally optional.

When it starts to simmer, add your goodies to each jar.

Ideas:

• bacon
• sausage
• ham
• spinach
• asparagus
• shallots/onions/garlic
• cheese
• kale
• coarse stone-ground mustard
• hot dogs (Shut up, you know your kids would LOVE IT.)
• black beans and salsa
• chicken and parmesan cheese
• salami
• chicken livers (according to Julia)
• etc...

The list could go on forever. Anything you have EVER put inside an omelet can be used for a baked egg.

Whatever you do, just make sure your ingredients are room temperature, if not hot.

Then add an egg (or two) to each jelly jar.

Your water should still be simmering!

Top each egg(s) with a tablespoon or two of HOT cream. If the cream isn't hot, your egg whites will be runny. (This is the biggest problem with Julia's original recipe!)

I also like to top mine with parmesan cheese and fresh cut chives from our herb garden.

Put the entire pan in the oven. Preferably on the rack that's one notch above the middle.

Bake for 8-10 minutes at 375 degrees.

EVEN IF THEY DON'T LOOK DONE, TAKE THEM OUT AFTER TEN MINUTES. If your eggs were room temperature and your cream was hot, THEY ARE DONE.

(I've made the mistake of overcooking them more than twice...)

(They won't look done, but they are.)

If you have picky eaters (or pregnant women) who don't like runny yolks, just pop theirs in the microwave for thirty seconds and you'll serve a perfect meal without ruining your masterpiece.

Baked eggs are best eaten with a spoon, maybe some hash browns, a blueberry muffin and DEFINITELY a fresh-squeezed mimosa.

(Or if you're under age, fresh squeezed OJ in a champagne glass with diet 7-Up.) We eat these almost every Sunday. This past Sunday, I had my entire local family over and I let people choose their own ingredients almost like an omelet bar. I ended up baking over a dozen eggs.

It was a lot quicker and easier than custom-made omeletes and everyone was happy.

(It's also totally gluten free!)

Enjoy!

Weekend at Gunzmont Farm (as captured by my sister-in-law's iPhone)

My brother came up from San Francisco for the weekend and brought his wife (Elita) and his two boys (Thomas, 5 and Andrew 2.5), which was perfect timing for them to be here for Genoa's birthday party on Saturday and for a huge family brunch on Sunday.There are a TON more photos that Elita downloaded straight from her magnificent beast of a camera from this weekend, but I still have to go through them (and I need a nap!)

Our house was FULL. It was CRAY-CRAY! And I loved every minute of it.

I miss them already.

In which my baby turns SIX

Genoa turns SIX tomorrow and that means I'm fighting the urge to sob uncontrollably about The Time and How Fast It Has Gone. Wasn't it just last week I was live-blogging her birth while Dave ran out to Safeway to buy her a birthday cake that ended up on cakewrecks.com?

SIX YEARS!

Tonight we made cupcakes for her class. With blue frosting. Because that's her favorite color. (This week.) When I tucked her in bed, I told her it was the last time I'd ever get to kiss my five-year old daughter. At first she thought I meant I'd never kiss her again, then when she figured it out, she laughed and begged me for more five-year-old kisses.

I couldn't help but wonder if I kiss her enough. Could I EVER?

Birthdays always make me morbid. Not only about the years themselves because there's nothing I can do about time. I've tried, trust me. But watching your children grow up is a constant war between hurry up and get older so you're not such a pain in the ass!  and stop growing up RIGHT THIS MINUTE because this moment is perfect. The contrast is even more vivid when you only get to see them half the time. It's like picking up new children every other week. Only they're mine. And knowing that I sometimes feel like I don't recognize them is the worst kind of guilt.

When Genoa was a baby, it all came so naturally to me. I felt like an instant mother - just add boobs! But every year it seems to get harder for me. Sometimes I feel bitter that my best parenting years were the very years my children will never remember. But worse than that is how hard I'm TRYING. I've never tried harder. And I HATE that it's an effort for me. I hate feeling like my children are work. I want motherhood to roll off my tongue as easily as a golf joke.

Needless to say, it doesn't.

I'm starting to think it never will and maybe that's how I'll make peace with it.

What I can say is that I love my daughter. I adore everything about her. I love her smooth hair and her perfect skin and the way she always smells so good. I love the way she cocks her hip every time I try to take her picture and how whenever Kei$ha's Tik Tok comes on the radio, she'll stop whatever she's doing and bust out the Wii Just Dance moves for that song.

I love that she's the best reader in her class. I love that she LOVES reading.  

I love that she has both terrified and inspired me from the moment I found out she was a girl.

I love that wanting to do right by her is the reason I now get to be who I am.

Genoa will never be easy, but she's worth the effort.

Happy sixth, Lady.

PMDD: Ahhhhhhhh FREAK OUT!

I spent a good three hours ranting and raving in my head this afternoon before I realized that OH. CRAP. It's that SUPER-FUN-TIME-OF-THE-MONTH again! I actually have it marked off on my calendar as "FREAK OUT" week. I literally get a text message from myself when my crazy brain takes over.

It's not that it reminds me that I'm crazy so much as it gives me a rather pleasant earworm:

I mean, c'est CHIC, right?

Only it's not so much fun to be in my head for this particular week every month.

I'm not sure what to do. I've tried what? Four different medications? None of them is right. Effexor made my  brain feel like a diabetic in a candy store, but it also increased my anxiety and made my vagina numb. Zoloft made me a zombie who didn't give a crap either way. I've been on Wellbutin for two months now (at the maximum dosage) and while it helps - in that I can actually RECOGNIZE that I'm being crazy - it does very little to turn the volume down on my crazy. Which, it turns out, isn't really all that helpful after all.

And then there are the orgasms.

Don't even get me started on that thread.

All this is just to say: being broken SUCKS. I wish I didn't have to deal with this. I wish my hormones didn't make me bipolar every month. I also wish my crazy week wasn't coinciding with both Genoa's birthday and the VERY EXCITING news that my brother is bringing me an adorable pair of nephews to fawn over this weekend.

Self-awareness is great and all, but sadly it isn't a solution.

I want out of my brain. Being this kind of prisoner is no fun at all.

Sunshine, Work, Golf, WAXTASTOPHY, Papusas, Mimosas

You guys! The sun came out this week! If you're not a Pacific Northwesterner, you probably don't have the foggiest clue what that means, but it basically means you end up putting your wool socks in a rubbermaid storage bin and leaving the house like this:Which sometimes also requires having a stern conversation with your step-daughter about how YOU can wear a short-spaghetti-strap dress with platform sandals, but she CAN'T because she's 11 and you're 36. Also, you're working on your tan and she needs to protect her virginal skin from burning.

Aside from our usual Monday, Wednesday, weekend schedule with Liza, we didn't have any kids this week, so it was basically WORK, WORK, WORK. Which was rad, to be honest. I'm not sure I've mentioned it much (ha!), but I love my job. I pretty much want to be BFF's with every one of my clients and unlike nearly every other aspect of being an esthetician (makeup, facials, etc.) waxing is much like vacuuming or mowing the lawn. You know when you're done. It's quite gratifying and I can't tell you how often I want to whip out a mirror when I'm done and be like, SEE HOW PRETTY YOU LOOK!!!

Anyway, the only day I wasn't swamped at work this week was Thursday. So Joel took me (and my bra straps) to the driving range.

I'd never golfed before and I have to say: I LOVED IT. You know, aside from the fashion dilemma. Apparently I own 27 dresses (at last count, which didn't include that blue dress above, which I recently bought at Target for $19), but nary a single pair of shorts. I ended up in a random skort I grabbed at a free clothing swap in Gresham a year ago and had never even tried on.

But the GOLF!!! It was fantastic. We went through over a hundred balls at the driving range and I loved every one of them. I also loved that as a first-time golfer, it's basically one giant dick joke. (Balls, grip, whack, stroke, choke, shaft, swing, drive, etc.) And that doesn't even take into account the whole "let me get behind you and show you how it's done!" part. (Which is hot.)  Mostly, though, there is something VERY satisfying about the sound and feel of hitting the ball in the sweet spot. I can't wait to do it again.

(SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE INNUENDO!!!)

Friday was a rather busy day at work. I think I waxed seven or eight sets of lady bits (and at least one set of manly bits!). But that wasn't the exciting part. The exciting part was when the wheel came off my co-worker's wax cart and the following mayhem ensued:

The sound it made was utterly terrifying, like a possee of insane clown monkeys had crashed through the window thinking our salon was a mosh pit. I raced across the hall and fully prepared myself to see blood when I opened Anna's door. Fortunately, aside from ruining her favorite pair of velvet pants and a cute t-shirt, she was fine. Unfortunately, it was after 6:00 and Joel had already made dinner reservations for 7:00, so I couldn't stay and help with the clean up.

Friday night we had a FANTASTIC dinner at Pizza Fino in North Portland, which is pretty much my favorite restaurant (the LIGER of Italian food). My definition of a good restaurant is anywhere I'm served something and I think, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW THEY DID THIS and I have to ask the chef for his/her secrets (which I do, unabashedly). Of course Joel and Liza made it extra special by bringing me flowers and a card and a thoughtful gift of my favorite soaps (all lemon verbena!) (He's LISTENING, you guys. And it rocks my world!) Dinner was amazing, as always:

The next morning, I woke up and went to work while Joel and Liza shopped for a costume for her to wear on Dress Like a Hipster Day at school. I waxed a few clients and then, because Anna was out of town, I made this happen:

Making that happen involved over a gallon of acetone, about six pubes towels and the top layer of skin on both of my shins. Not to mention two hours of my Saturday afternoon.

But it was worth it.

Because after I was all done (and high on acetone fumes), I rewarded myself with PAPUSAS:

I had never tried them before, but papusas are basically really thick pitas made out of corn masa and stuffed with magic. Our friends have all been raving about the various food carts that make them here in Portland and the universe aligned just right so that after leaving work and stopping on my way home to buy purple shampoo to keep my hair from turning yellow, I drove right by a cart pod advertising this South American delicacy. I hadn't eaten all day, so I burned a little bit of rubber in my haste to pull over.

Then I proceeded to send Joel the following series of raunchy text messages along with photos of the food:

Don't hate me for doing this without you.

F*ck me in the *ss sideways with a baseball bat! These are amazing!

Only $2.50 each!

I'm taking them home so I can properly make out with them.

With tequila.

I'll hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the front door so nobody interrupts.

OMG! They came with spicy coleslaw!!

Duuuuuuude.

You're lucky I don't have a stomach because I saved half for you!

After a very inappropriate session with the papusas, I made a frittata and we went to a party at a friend's house and let's just say I wasn't the designated driver. We all slept till noon Sunday morning and then made brunch.

We started, as is becoming our regular Sunday ritual, with Mimosas.

[Did you know that ALFRED HITCHCOCK invented the mimosa? Because this is something Joel thinks you should know.]

You should also know EXACTLY how to make one:

Start with about a dozen VALENCIA oranges.

Juice them! Hopefully you have a better juicer than my 50-year-old Kitchen Aid.

Buy a bottle of local ten dollar champagne. Preferably a Brut. We like Domaine St. Michelle and it's usually under $9.
Here's the trick though: you have to fill your champagne flute half-way full with champagne and then pour ONLY A TINY, TINY DROP of fresh-squeezed orange juice into the glass. Otherwise it will overflow with bubbly goodness and you will WASTE champagne! Which is punishable by death.

(In France.)

(And Remulak.)

But AFTER you've added that tiny, TINY drop? You can wait for it to settle down and then easily fill the glass without worrying about spillage.

It only took us a year of Sundays to figure this out.

Also - before you go thinking it's fine to substitute a carton of good orange juice for fresh-squeezed:

DON'T BOTHER.

It's like the difference between VHS and DVD. Or shaving vs. waxing. It's worth the pain!

Anyway, while Joel was making my favorite Sunday morning beverage (and cleaning the whole. entire. kitchen.) I was making brunch. And it was a doozy. I plan to come back here tomorrow and post my recipe for baked eggs. I've had some questions about it and thought it would be a good one to photograph. Unfortunately, my camera broke, so you'll all have to make do with iPhone pics until I get it fixed.

Hasta manana...

Nothing is easy. Everything is beautiful.

Lately my life has become complicated in ways I could never even TRY to blog about. But it's also insanely beautiful. So I'm going to post photos for a while until I get over myself.

Let's start with the rad party we had a week ago Saturday, of which it turns out I took zero photos. We had dozens of our closest friends over for Cinco de Mayo and some serious drinking occurred. And by serious, I mean multiple gallons of tequila magically disappeared even though I kept refilling the punch bowl. And then FORGETTING that I'd refilled it. Because all of a sudden! There it was! Empty! Again!

By the end of the night, I actually broke one of my cardinal rules: NEVER RUN OUT OF BOOZE. (Or food, but there was plenty of that since I made a fuckton of carnitas and my best friends came early and rolled out handmade tortillas while I put on mascara at the last minute.)

I didn't take any photos of the party itself because I was too busy enjoying it, but I did snap a few of Joel's mad decorating skills before everyone showed up. This is what he did with the fireplace mantle:

You should click to embiggen that one because he made those two art pieces himself. The only thing I contributed was my busted-ass collection of Ball jars, some mercury glass shit I bought at Target for 75% off and the antique letter blocks that spell out our initials. He made all the ACTUAL art. (One more reason he's a keeper.)

He also put my Dude on a chair, which I love.

The next day we woke up and made mimosas. Because the only cure for tequila poisoning is more alcohol.

Then we found an unexpectedly perfect hangover remedy: WE WENT FOR A SAIL. On the river. On the most beautiful day we've had this year.

One of the ADDITIONAL things I love about Joel is that he has no problem whatsoever hanging out with another man I've dated.

Say hello to Chris:

We met on OK Cupid and dated for a little while, but our timing was problematic and he ended up reconnecting with his ex-girlfriend right around the time I got serious with Joel.

But in spite of our piss-poor romantic timing, Chris and I have always maintained a fantastic friendship.

He's the one I go to when I need man advice and he always somehow talks me down the safe side of the ledge. He's also the one who took us out on the Columbia River last Sunday on his boat.

Which was pretty much perfect.

By the following afternoon, I was finally sober enough to pick up my kids and we ended up having a rather drama-free week (at least kid-wise). I'd like to think I had SOMETHING to do with that, but honestly we can all thank the SWEET MERCIFUL sun for coming out and relieving me from relentlessly entertaining two children who are smart enough to know that they're being entertained.

We barbecued!

Or rather, JOEL did.

Genoa stole Sara's sunglasses.

Which was so cute, I tried to eat her.

Then she tried to eat Cinnamon Chip.

Which isn't fair because she's still technically a baby. (The chick, not the child.)

Then Alex had to introduce us to his leetle friend.

(He's 100% second grade mafia.)

Then the man finally got to eat. And last night, I finally turned those leftover grilled tomatoes and peppers into a pasta sauce. Which was every bit as good as you'd imagine. By the end of the week, we finished planting our garden (photos ASAP!) so I'm hoping to bottle Manda's BBQ'd Tomato Gravy by the end of summer...

A brief history of my hair

Five years ago, I was a mermaid.

And I'll admit, my natural hair is rather... majestic. You know, in a Dungeons and Dragons sort of way. But because I had two children under four and no social life, I spent 90% of my life looking like this:
Which is not sexy AT ALL. So I donated THE FRO to Locks of Love.
And that left me looking like so:

And sometimes (by which I mean during the three days after I got my hair cut and my stylist blew it out for me), I looked like this:
When I met Joel, I looked like this. You know, ridiculously HAPPY and be-curled.
Then I wanted a change (100% my idea), so I went red.Which sometimes made me feel sophisticated.
And other times made me feel like the clown from Steven King's IT.

But several months before my divorce, I wrote out a Life List and one of the items on said list was to go blond for a year. So when I mentioned that to Joel, he got all excitificated (in his pants) (and elsewhere) and I decided that rather than touch up my roots and stay red, I might just as well save my hair the drama and go blond. Because it was clearly in my cards...

As was some very, very red lipstick (on my teeth).The only problem was that the bleach totally and completely fried my hair. It would still curl, but only in a dangerous, Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction sort of way. So here I was a year later and the last time I went in for a haircut, I tried to get my usual A-line bob and the stylist was, like, I'll do my best, but your bangs are so fried they're all broken off... And she was right. I no longer had enough hair to get a decent haircut.

BUT I LOVE BEING BLOND.

I feel like it's my signature. People recognize Joel and I on the street! "Aren't you two the ones who write that BLOG?!?!"

The blond and the baldman.

It's just... right.

So instead of changing my color, I salvaged what was left of my hair by chopping off all the crusty bits. Which means there isn't much left. It's SHORT. Shorter hair than I've ever had before.

But I still get to be blond!

Even if it does make my boobs look too big.

No. Seriously It does.

WHY IS THAT?!?!

But the best part is that it actually feels like HAIR again. It's SOFT. And today I spent exactly THIRTY SECONDS fixing it and it looked like this:

Even though I think I'd still like it to be shorter in the back...I'll take it.

Is it weird that the shorter I cut my hair, the more I feel like I'm exposing the real me? I think my hair used to serve as a shroud. First it hid my fatness, then it hid my unhappiness.

Now all you get is me, my tattoo and, apparently, my boobs.

My first tattoo: YES

On Joel's birthday, I got my first tattoo.

(Also worth noting: I recently chopped off all my hair!)

It wasn't ONLY about his birthday, but also about me wanting to do a bit of self-reclamation. Call it self-oil-rigging. I mean, yeah, it WAS on his birthday and that makes it memorable, particularly since the tattoo was designed by Joel and written in his handwriting.

But it was mostly about making my mandafesto part of me again.

Especially since it was my mandafesto that made Joel fall in love with me in the first place.

The weird thing is that I never wanted a tattoo, even though we live in tattoo city, where everyone from your waitress to your pediatrician has a full sleeve or their favorite Shakespeare quote written across their chest. From birth, it had been distilled in me that tattoo's were taboo and that no matter how great the idea seems at the time, you WILL REGRET IT. But the moment the idea of getting a one popped into my head, I said YES. Sure, that little voice inside my head said, "Mom's gonna HATE it!" but it turns out I'm not talking to my mom, in my head or otherwise.

So I had the man I love practice it a dozen times until I found just the right YES to put on my body.

Use your BEST penmanship, baby! It's gonna be there forever!

Finally, about ten minutes before my appointment, Joel drew his final draft on a receipt at Trader Vic's, where I was busy slamming down Mai Tai's in anticipation of the horrible, terrific pain to which I was about to subject myself.

It was perfect.

So I had Lucky Malony at Anatomy Tattoo put it on my neck.

Don't worry, no one knows better than me how strange it is to go straight from never wanting a tattoo EVER, to getting one on your NECK.

But I said YES.  And I absolutely LOVE it. (Did I mention that YES is my favorite word? Because YES, YES it is.)

My only wish is that it had been more painful because it didn't hurt AT ALL. Even after Lucky started, I kept thinking, this is it? I would describe the sensation as annoying, particularly given its proximity to my left eardrum, but it took him all of eight minutes from start to finish and I smiled through the whole damn thing.

Which sucked! I actually wanted it to be REALLY painful. Worse than childbirth, even. I wanted the pain to remind me - in a detailed and memorably graphic way - that I'm a woman who SAYS YES.

I guess I'll just have to get another one.