Eggs in Purgatory

Well, there has been some blizzard cooking going on around here for the last few days. I'm not even going to show you my one millionth attempt to make bread (other than my faithful beer bread). I actually was so irritated that it didn't work (why why why won't my bread rise in the oven???) that I made a second, only mildly better, batch. But, what DID emerge from all of this is what I think will be a new go-to recipe that I'm pretty excited about.

I went to brunch this morning and on the menu was "shakshuka", basically eggs poached in a tomato mixture. The version I had was based on tomatillos (side note: spell check would like me to change 'tomatillos' to 'automatism'), so was green and spicy and delicious. I knew I had to try to make it myself!

I didn't have tomatillos, I actually only had cherry tomatoes, but this recipe does not seem to be very picky.

The stuff (generally speaking):
1 tomato, chopped (or, a bunch of cherry tomatoes)
1/2 bell pepper, chopped fine
onion, chopped (I only had spring onions, and used 2)
1/8 tsp red pepper flakes
2 cloves garlic
1/4 tsp paprika
salt to taste
oil for cooking veggies
2 eggs
bread, to sop things up

What to do with it:
This amount of veggie worked for 2 eggs, if you want more eggs, increase as needed.
Pan selection is actually relatively important- since the egg will be cooking in the tomato mixture, not on the bottom of a pan, you want a pan that is small enough that a reasonable amount of veggies will pile deep enough to sit the egg in.  I used my little cast iron pan that I normally use for eggs.

Heat the oil, put in the garlic and onions for a minute, then throw in the tomato, pepper, and spices. Cover, and let it cook together until it tastes like the tomatoes are cooked. Honestly, all of my vegetable volume selection was geared towards filling the pan, but keep in mind they will all cook down a bit too. Once they are cooked, clear a spot for each egg and crack it in gently. Turn down the heat, cover, and heat. You really want to be sure the white gets firm, but the yolk should be soft or runny. I did a lot of poking the white with my finger to figure this out.

What's really good is that the yolk kind of runs into the tomatoes and makes them really rich and delicious. It's also good to have some bread handy, to sop up the tomato and egg.

This is one of those things that I can imagine being really flexible- you could probably throw in almost any choppable vegetable, and I'm sure you could make it with canned tomatoes, which puts it in the magical realm of things you can make on the fly with stuff from the pantry. You can also get away with pretty minimal oil which makes this both delicious and healthy! I'm sure I'll be having it again!

In Which I Take 3 Months to Paint One Dresser

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Now, I'm not sure what made me develop a sudden and passionate hatred for my dresser when I moved, but... I did. In retrospect, this was probably fueled more by obsessive reading of crafty decorating blogs and Pinterest rather than by anything about the dresser itself, whose main crime was not matching my new wardrobe and being a little boring.

I was a little nervous about ruining what was in reality a perfectly fine, functional piece of furniture, so I read a lot about how to paint Ikea (and other laminate) furniture, and finally got to work (yes, this process began in September).

Step one was to drag the boring dresser into the living room where there is a bit more room (followed by step one and a half: mourn new apartments lack of balcony).

Step 2 was to realize that I did not own a drop cloth of any kind. What I DID own was a ton of plastic grocery bags- normally I try to be conscientious about bringing in my own bags to the store, but the moving process made that go haywire, so quite a few were laying around. I elected to cut them flat and tape them together, making an upcycled drop cloth.

From my reading, it was clear that sanding is absolutely necessary, as is priming. I bought some very fine grained paper, dismantled the dresser, and got to work. Here I am, dutifully sanding (which takes forever, by the way). After sanding get rid of the dust with moist cloth and let it dry.

For primer, I felt like everything I read recommended something different, so finally I just asked the guy at the hardware store down the street. I ended up with Bulls Eye 1-2-3 and if there is anything wrong with it I haven't found it yet.

Then, (reading more), I decided to make the makeover a little more interesting by using specially designed overlays, which you basically glue onto the drawer front with wood glue (or, I used Liquid Nails) and then paint along with everything else. Of course, I decided this after I had already primed, so then I had to prime the overlays too. The hardest part by far was centering them! You'll notice that the drawers are lined up so I could make sure they looked the same.

Then, I painted it white with acrylic paint. Unfortunately, at this point I hated it even more than I had before, but I dragged it back and used it like it was for a few months because I was tired and I wanted my living room back (there appear to be no pictures of this dark period).

Basically what happened was that as a total paint-newbie, I didn't know that "white" as we think of it is not really absolute white, but has a little bit of tint in there. The plain paint at the store is WHITE. Really, really, insanely white. My dresser was the blinding white of overly bleached teeth. Actually, it was kind of like this Friends episode:

After living with the blinding white for months, finally, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do on Super Bowl Sunday (which clearly was not going to be watching football), I decided to tackle it again (see, at least some tackling was happening).

At my little hardware store, they don't mix paint. So, you buy some tint and mix it yourself. I bought some Rust-oleum Painters Touch Semi-gloss white, squeezed in the tint, and stirred it in, and I imagined it being a nice gentle color, sort of like the rug you can see in the pictures. Well... it turned out that the paint dried a MUCH more intense color than I'd imagined. But, it's growing on me... now it's kind of a bright spot in the room and looks really cute and perky- definitely much more personality than its original incarnation... (yes, for the photo it is temporarily still on a bit of dropcloth, just in case the very bottom wasn't dry and wrecked the wood floor, but I was super excited and wanted to document it).

At the very least, it sure does match the quilt!

UPDATE:

You can see the dresser in a new home, a little more dressed up, in this post.