Marred Musings

Carolans and Chrissy

Inspiration tends to emerge from the most unfortunate situations.

Just before the holidays, I took an allergy test. It was one of those panel tests where they inject you with 70 different allergens in a grid shape on your back, then they measure all the spots that puff up past a certain millimeter threshold. I subjected myself to this pseudo-torture because I had an episode this summer where I became so allergic to whatever was in my apartment that my eyes shut from my face puffing up so much. I was put on steroids 3 times over 3 or 4 months to reduce the swelling (which still barely went down enough for me to open my eyes), and I eventually just had to move. When I was restored to health and relatively settled into my new place, I scheduled an allergy test. The date fell just a few days before Thanksgiving.

As I lay face down on crinkly paper over an exam bench in the doctor’s office with my back exposed and itching, my diagnosis was read aloud to me: “let’s see – it looks like you’re allergic to three types of mold, all the native plants and trees of the midwest, two different types of cockroaches, blah blah blah blah blah and blah blah and WHEAT and OATS and blah blah blah”

“EXCUSE ME WHAT CAN YOU PLEASE GO BACK TO THAT WHEAT THING FOR A MINUTE THANK YOU.” [crinkly paper noises]

“Oh that. Well. At least you can still eat chocolate!”

[crinkly paper noises]

[silent shock]

[crinkly paper noises]

I was a legit baker at a legit bakery in college. The weekend before this appointment, I made a few loaves of bread for the first time in a while. I sobbed when I got home. I sobbed before and after Thanksgiving. I had made 2 homemade pies the night before my appointment to bring to a Friendsgiving gathering, and I couldn’t even eat them. I was despondent to new bounds.

Then I hung out with Book Club.

Book Club has propped me up more than they know. Yes, we drink more bottles of wine than total attendants each gathering. Absolutely, snacks abound. Narrators are always questioned. Laughter is ample – tears trail behind in close second. It’s a book club in every sense of the phrase, and I love love love it to depths I didn’t understand were possible.

Well this year, we had a White Elephant gift exchange, and the gift I ended up with (since we’re classy ladies who do things right) was Cravings: Recipes For All The Food You Want To Eat by Chrissy Teigen.

The irony was not lost on me or anyone in the group – the lactose-intolerant vegetarian with wheat, oat, and shellfish allergies got the hottest cookbook on the market, chock-full of recipes with all the things she couldn’t possibly ingest unless she had a death-wish. Regardless, I was beyond thrilled to get this beauty of a book. At first, I was simply excited about all the gorgeous pictures of John Legend and Chrissy Teigen that pepper the pages, but as I thumbed through the high-def recipe photos and skimmed through the ingredients, I realized that this was an opportunity to take drool-inducing final products and see if I could replicate them with items that adhere to my own dietary restrictions. Surely I’m not the only wheat-oat-shellfish-and-meat-free person on the planet that wants to still be able to enjoy a cookbook written by beautiful pop culture icons?! Of course I’m not. Inspiration struck, and my New Year’s Resolution to cook all the things in the book was born.

John’s Breakfast Sandwiches

&

Crispy Bacon Hash Browns

The Substitutions:

• Coconut bacon for real bacon (seriously check out that link for the homemade coconut bacon recipe from this amazing vegetarian blog called Cookie & Kate that will BLOW YOUR MIND even when you eat it cold and straight from the freezer like I do sometimes when I’m impatient or sad or just eating to pass the time)
• Beyond Meat Beyond Beef Crumbles – Beefy flavored for the ground pork
• Dark brown sugar for light brown sugar, because that’s what was in my pantry
• Mikey’s Toasted Onion Gluten Free English Muffins for regular english muffins
• Fresh diced sage for crushed sage, because I’m a baller

The Gist:

• Gluten free muffins are gross and gummy. Tastes like a corn muffin, and not a good one.
• Sausage patties were not patties but crumbles, due to not-real-meat not having binding agents like real raw meat (the fatty deliciousness usually holds patties together with the rull meats, so I’ve got to find a better substitute). Not bad flavor though, not bad at all.
• I think the coconut bacon made the taters soggy, or something. Or vice versa. In any case, the taters were soggy and not crispy. I guess I could have left them on longer, but I left them on the pan twice as long as the suggested time and they still weren’t KRISPY like snap crackle and pop, but continued to look MORE soggy due to the wilting coconut bacon. Next time, I’d cook the taters longer by themselves and throw the baconut on top, to make sure both are nice and crunchy.
• My egg wasn’t great but that’s because I’m a doofus and don’t know how to cook sunny-side up eggs well quite yet
• Fresh sage was dope. Really came through.
• Loved the kick of the crushed red pepper. Truly.
• Sriracha was alright – it compliments the sage and red pepper well but I’m not a huge fan of sriracha in general, so I might substitute it for straight-up red hot sauce like Tito’s or Valentina’s. Probably Valentina’s, I mean, let’s be real.
• Brown sugar isn’t super present but it’s really nice when it pops through in contrast with the hot sauce

Impairment: Carolans Irish Cream in iced coffee that I saved from earlier that morning.

Overall, it was a solid first effort. The altered recipe has potential, and I could see how it would be a killer breakfast sandwich with all of the ingredients that I can’t eat. Alas, I think I did well with what I had to work with.

What I really loved most about these recipes though, were the leftovers. The breakfast I made the next day was INCREDIBLE. I nixed the english muffins and fried up a perfectly runny egg, all by it’s lonesome. I then delicately slapped that egg onto a bed of the sage and brown-sugar flavored beef-substitute crumbles and extra crispy baconut hash browns. I slathered all of that with my coveted proprietary mixture of the extra hot and the regular hot Valentina hot sauces, then I basked in the sunlight spilling through my dining-room windows with a steaming cup of fresh coffee while scarfing all of it down before my cat jumped on the table.