Ceviche.

One of my most favoritest people, Bradley Short, inspired me with his delectable blog post to be, well, not lazy and finally write this ceviche entry. On my way back from New Orleans I was seized with the desire to eat healthy, which is probably attributed to eating 1,500 calorie meals like these the entire time:

Bacon sundae with praline and smoked salt. Because you need to find out the true limits of human salt and fat consumption.

Sweet potato praline. I'm not really into confections, despite the last two photos, but I would gladly shave off the last year of my life to have an easy supply of these.

Couchon at Couchon Butcher.

A cross section: Perfectly crispy skin surrounding moist chunks of aggressively spiced tenderloin.

Oh god, and the pancetta mac and cheese from Couchon is easily the best thing I've eaten all year. Or decade.

See aforementioned comment concerning sodium.

Yeah, so I've been on a healthy kick lately to combat the decadence of Nola. Luckily I was making the 4.5h car ride with a gal from Guadalajara who knows a thing or everything about ceviche. I grew up stealing tortillas from her house. She told me exactly how she and her fam makes their weekly ceviche:


Richter's Ceviche
Serves 6 hungry people.

• 1 lbs tilapia or a mixture of tilapia, peeled shrimp, bay scallops, or any other mild white seafood. This is not the place for oily fishy fish, no matter how much you're jonesing for omega-3s
• 1 large avocado, diced
• 1/2 large red onion, diced
• 1 c cilantro, chopped
• 3 roma tomatoes, seeded and diced
• 1 serrano pepper, diced fine (I leave the seeds in, but you can take them out if you don't like spice)
• Tony Chachere's, to taste (I didn't know what this was, but I wasn't about to argue with a strong willed Mexican woman)
• 3/4 c jicama, small cubes
• 1 T olive oil
• 12 limes (or more, depending)
• S&P

The start.

1. Cut the fish/shrimp/scallops into 1/4" to 1/2" cubes and place in a non-reactive vessel. The size of your seafood will determine how long of a lime soak is required. I like mine a bit chunky so it took about 30m of soaking. To the limes!

Jumping the gun on the limes.

2. Juice enough limes to cover the seafood completely. This is the less enjoyable part, especially when your hands are constantly covered in paper cuts from your office job.

Ooo.

3. Allow the fish to cook/marinade in the lime juice for at least 20m in the fridge. The proteins will denature causing it to become opaque. You can soak the fish for more or less time, depending on how "cooked" you like it. I usually go to about 30-40m. During this break, make your pico in a separate bowl...

Ew.

4. Combine the tomatoes, cilantro, onion, jicama, salt & pepper, Tony's, and olive oil in a separate container. Taste and adjust seasoning as necessary.

5. Drain your fish from the lime. I found this step unusual, but came to really like the balance when all the lime juice is drained away. Mix with the pico. Add the avocado at the end so it doesn't disintegrate. Mix and serve with tortilla chips/tortillas/a spoon/Couchon's sweet potato habanero sauce

Garnish fanciness on par with boredom.

Egg-stacy.

(I know, you didn't think a pun could get that bad. THE PUNISHER RETURNS.)

They say egg cookery is the most essential of chef-y skillz. To become a chef in Jacques Pepin's kitchen, prospective hires had to make a perfect omelette as their entrance exam. The 100 folds in a chef's toque symbolize the hundred ways he or she should be able to prepare an egg. So, friends, put away those egg beaters and find someone with a chicken coop. My friend, Bear, was kind enough to bring me a dozen from his hens in Austin.

BEHOLD. Btw, Chicken eggs vary in color due to pigments which are deposited as the eggs move through the hen's oviduct. These pigments are genetic, something like hair color, and vary from chicken to chicken. Mmm, oviduct deposits.

Many a befuddled friend has asked how restaurant eggs are always so perfectly round and/or cooked evenly. The secret? Either a very small pan or, as pictured below, a ring mold. You see, as the egg ages part of the white becomes watery and less viscous than the other parts. In fact, the height of the white is used commercially to determine the age of an egg (using Haugh units, which no one cares about). The watery parts spread out in a pan and cook to a leathery crisp by the time the yolk or perky white have a chance to feel the heat. Ring molds/small pans cajole the egg to an even thickness. This is a really long winded way of saying, it cooks better this way. Spray the ring mold with non-stick spray and make sure it's food safe before heating in a pan, please.

Free range eggs generally have a richer golden hue to their yolks because the chickens have had more opportunity to eat carotenoid rich plants (as opposed to being locked in a 8"x8" pen with only corn feed to console it)

Bien. I ended up putting this on an english muffin with roasted eggplant, spinach, and whole grain mustard but was too frenzied with hunger to get a good picture. Please try to imagine it for now and I will make it for you the next time I see you.

Now that you know more than you ever cared to know about eggs, here are some cool things you can do with them:

Soak an egg in vinegar to take off the shell.

Make Chinese Marbled Eggs. This preparation doesn''t change the flavor, but they're striking. Excellent instructions here: http://www.pigpigscorner.com/2011/01/marbled-red-vinasse-eggs.html

Attempt to play along with Wylie Dufrene and his love of eggs. And yes, the intro music is awful.

There's also:

• The perfect cheese souffle
• An egg briskly cooked atop a woodfired pizza
• Hollandaise
• Angel food cake
• Macarons
• Mayonnaise
• Challah
• Poached eggs on... anything
• Soft scrambled eggs, which are more complicated than you think. Go here for an appropriately fatty recipe. Also, when I googled "Bill's scrambled eggs" this came up: 

And so many other dishes. Doesn't seem so hard to get to 100, does it?