a little tractor adventure

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!

chinese hotdish

a few months ago, i was flipping through a few of eggmum's old church cookbooks when i found my stripper name in the casserole chapter of the 1984 our savior's lutheran book: chinese hotdish. it was nestled between beef pie and oriental hotdish, and i took it as a sign for my true calling. not to be a stripper, but to finally become a true woman of the north by making a hotdish. 

ok, what is a hotdish.

if you're not from the northern midwest, you probably know it as a casserole. from what i understand, all hotdishes can be considered casseroles, but not all casseroles are hotdishes because a true hotdish has three main components--meat, vegetables, and creamed soup--which are dumped into a casserole dish, and then, in the words of sam sifton, you cover the bitch in tater tots and bake it. some hotdishes use wild rice or mashed potatoes or another type of grain or starch instead of tater tots, although covering the bitch in tater tots is really fun to say.

so, like, technically you can make a mac and cheese casserole, but without meat and a vegetable, it wouldn't totally be a hotdish. 

all of this is obviously up for debate and i am in no way an authority, i'm just going by church cookbook research, wikipedia, and the delicious hotdishes that eggmama makes. (and whether it's hot dish or hotdish is still something i do not know.)

hotdishes are as comforting as a new fleece blanket on a cold winter day and they make excellent leftovers. here are some examples of things that you can put into a casserole dish in order to make a hotdish:

hamburger meat + peas + cream of mushroom soup + tater tots

pulled chicken + wild rice + celery + cream of chicken soup

chopped spam + macaroni noodles + cream of mushroom soup + velveeta cheese + onions

i have never tried that spam one, but if you were to place the other ones on an x/y chart where x = how much it looks like barf, and y = how delicious it is, they would be maxed out on both accounts. that's the charm of a hotdish. 

for my first hotdish, i've made a variation on the chinese hotdish in the our savior's lutheran book. as much as i loved the sort of imaginary camaraderie of standing in the creamed soup section, piling cans upon cans into my basket, and then coming home and placing them on the shelf marked with a handwritten label for "cream of mush" that egggrandma must have made decades ago, i couldn't actually bring myself to use it without first trying some less processed options.

i know, coconut milk isn't technically a creamed soup, but it is creamy, and slightly sweet, and the results even got the eggboy seal of approval. i used brown rice to up the healthy ante, and scallions to add flavor and greenery. a little ginger here and some ground pork or chicken there, and this guy might even be ready for the annual hotdish competition.

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chinese hotdish

makes 3-4 servings

ingredients

1 pound ground chicken or pork

2 tb soy sauce

1 tsp chopped fresh ginger or 1/4 tsp ground ginger

black pepper

3/4 c brown rice (short or medium grain)

1 c chicken broth

1 13.5 oz. can coconut milk (regular or light)

4 stalks scallions, minced

crispy noodles or crispy fried shallots, for topping

clues

preheat oven to 375.

in a small* dutch oven or other stove-safe/oven-safe dish, brown your meat with the soy sauce, ginger, and a few turns of black pepper.

*the dutch oven that's pictured has a 2 quart capacity. also, if you don't have a stove-safe/oven-safe dish, you can certainly brown the meat separately and then add it to a casserole dish.

add the brown rice, chicken broth, coconut milk, and scallions, and give it a little swirl.

bake for about 1 1/2 hours, until the rice is tender. it will still be slightly liquidy. let it cool for about 10 minutes, top with noodles or shallots, and enjoy!

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-yeh!

pictured: dutch oven // knife // measuring cups

the egg girl (an aquavit & rosemary cocktail) + scenes from our little married life

my first weekend as a married lady was a lot like sunday afternoons in the juilliard dorm when we were just too hungover to drum. it included a lot of buttered toast and a lot of oh, just one more office episode! not having a wedding to plan or a wedding dress to fit into has yielded things like many many cheesy pickles with our new volleyball team (we are called the cheesy pickles), three batches of vanilla cake, a loaf of bread baked by eggboy (!?!!?), and an impromptu adventure to the woods outside of duluth.  

our little trip came right after the wedding when our hangovers turned into colds and our last out of town guests had departed. we downloaded all of serial, packed our bathing suits, and set off for the cutest lodge we could find that had a sauna. there we stayed until 2015, when we decided that we had better explore downtown duluth. and oh, for cute! i wanted to put it in my pocket and bring it home. we watched boats go by and met a very funny moose. we ate bison pastrami and elk burgers and local string cheese, and then washed it all down with a lumbersexual at emily's amazing distillery. it was approximately zero degrees but it's ok i had my husband to keep me warm (*sorry* that was mushy overload). it was the perfect preview of our honeymoon next month, titled mr. and mrs. egg don't do anything for two weeks except eat schnitzel and look at alps.

upon our return, we cleaned and stressed out about serial and then segued into the aforementioned lazy lady weekend. life as a married person is actually kind of pretty much the same, just with less ikea dishes and more fancy things like a smeg toaster and vitamix blender. so what i'm really trying to say is, my first nine days as a married person were everything i wanted them to be.

ok! i made a cocktail about myself. we did that thing at our wedding where we had his and hers drinks except eggboy's was just glenlivet neat, so that's why there's no recipe for an eggboy. (side note: thoughts on the space between egg and girl? egggirl looks like it was a mistake and eggirl actually is a mistake so, um, never mind...) we tossed around so many ideas for what our drinks could be. his: chamomile tea, hers: a shot of vodka. his: lemon water, hers: cake batter. his: spinach, hers: hot dog water... 

rosemary obviously played a huge part in our wedding. we had a rosemary girl instead of a flower girl, the boutonnieres were made out of rosemary, and then, yes, this rosemary cocktail emerged as the one for me. we chose to have aquavit in it as a nod to eggboy's norwegian heritage, and we specifically chose vikre's aquavit because it comes from minnesota and the distillery is owned by emily, the lady behind five and spice and one of my most faaaavorite food52 columns, and her husband, joel. they are the coolest!!! i was able to personally thank them for my wedding hangover when we were in duluth, and holy smokes, they are treasure troves of knowledge when it comes to distilling. the caraway in their aquavit is super strong and wonderful, it made the perfect partner to all of the challah and prosciutto that i scarfed down at the start of the cocktail hour. and the rosemary syrup is one of the easiest things to make. 

the next time you're feeling blah because it's january, a.k.a. the monday of months, whip one of these up and you'll be good!

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the egg girl

makes 1

fill a glass with ice

add 1 ounce aquavit,

1/2 ounce rosemary syrup (see below),

and fill to the top with fizzy water.

garnish with a sprig of rosemary and a twist of orange peel

rosemary simple syrup

whisk together 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water, add 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary, and simmer for 15 minutes.

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-yeh!

a gingerbread farm

here is what our farm looks like! for the most part. it's not totally to scale and it's actually a vision of what the future will look like because there is a hot tub and a few ponies romping around, and with the exception of the pink tractor, it is all edible! there are za'atar trees and matcha trees and heart-shaped jolly rancher windows... even a shameless gingerbread buick lesabre. 

i spent more hours that i'm willing to admit on this, and if i had a dollar for every time eggboy conveyed that i was a lunatic in the process, i'd have enough to buy a real pony, but it was 100% worth every second just to see the looks on all of the eggs' faces when they saw it. eggboy's lucky that i didn't set this in the middle of our living room and scatter coconut flakes all over the floor to represent the wheat fields and sugar beet fields. i will save that for next year.

i'd like it to be known that i did not throw one frustration-induced tantrum during this whole process. that's probably a given because technically i am a grown-up, but i've got an awful track record (which in past years has resulted in having to construct a house of cardboard and glue through a sea of tears), so i am very proud of myself for this. 

do you want to have a tantrum-free gingerbread house building experience? i have secrets for you over on food52! follow along this week with a series of three gingerbread house posts that cover: how to make rock hard walls that won't collapse, how to make icing that will dry like cement, and how to make fun little accessories like a blue raspberry hot tub and cylindrical pieces of gingerbread wall for a grain bin or silo. and you'll get a little tour of our farm in the process :)

go check it out!

-yeh!