When Social Networking is Your Cookbook

I stumbled upon this recipe for baked egg boats last week.  A few days later I went shopping and what's on sale but most of the ingredients:  pancetta (already diced, too!), cheese, and baguettes.  (You can find me on StumbleUpon as CannedAm.)

Recipes aren't always perfect upon reading, however.  While gruyere would be lovely in this recipe, at several dollars for a few ounces, I'm not buying it.  Cheddar is also lovely and did you know that light (lower fat), aged cheddar has more calcium in it than any other food source per serving? Hard aged cheeses also lose most of the lactose.  With a lactose-intolerant vegetarian among my brood, aged light cheddar is a staple.   I also have no desire to use heavy cream, let alone purchase a container just for a lunchtime recipe, so I used regular 1% milk instead.

I think the Dempster's demi baguettes are longer than the ones Teri at Spoon Fork Bacon used.  The plain white variety is less porous than the sourdough she used, and I think both those factors necessitated an increased cook time.

I made three baguettes using the onions, pancetta, and cheddar with eggs and milk mix and one baguette using spinach instead of pancetta.

I may have been a little heavy-handed with the spinach.  I used about 1/2 cup of raw spinach, chopped and should have used less for only one baguette.  I would love to show you what it looked like once cut, but she took it and ran away with it right after I snapped this picture!

I've always hand-written my recipes in a way that is helpful for my ADD brain to follow and not lose track of where I am and what I am doing.  The standard recipe format requires one to look back and forth from ingredients to instructions and for an ADHD person, a single distraction in that process can spell recipe disaster.  While my hand-written method is rather messy and hard for anyone but me to decipher, one day I stumbled upon Cooking for Engineers and there I saw tables that were just like my own scribbles, but so much neater!  It hadn't occurred to me to use tables, so I had never digitized my hand-written recipes.  I am doing so now!

A more visual person than I would probably want to colour code a table like this.

If that's too hard to understand, here it is the old-fashioned way:


Ingredients:

• 4 demi baguettes
• 5 eggs
• 1/3 cup milk
• 4 ounces/115 grams pancetta, finely chopped and fried until crisp*
• 3 ounces shredded cheddar cheese
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Cut a deep “V” through the tops of each baguette until about a 1/2 inch to the bottom. Partially unstuff the baguettes. Set aside.
3. Place the eggs and milk into a mixing bowl and lightly beat together. Whisk in the remaining ingredients 4. Divide and pour the mixture into each baguette boat and place onto a baking sheet.
4. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown, puffed and set in the center. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Allow to cool for about 5 minutes, cut and serve.

*Substitute an 1/4 cup of fresh chopped spinach for pancetta for each baguette.

And yes, they were very well-received.  Delicious!