Eggs in a Nest: A Paleo Adventure

Job and I have been working on eating healthier and adding some more produce to our meals.  We’ve also been trying to make cheap food that is tasty and we can bring for lunch a few times a week/ is super fast to make.

Enter our friends Laurent and Buster who have been sporting a super healthy eating and living style.  One day while I was on lunch break, Laurent happened to have lunch at the same time as me.  He pulled out something that smelled so good! I asked him what he had there, and he proceeded to enlighten me about Eggs in a Nest.

Now if you google search Eggs in a Nest, you get a trillion recipes, but this one is different. Laurent sent me the recipe that he found on this awesome Dutch Paleo blog. (If you can read/speak Dutch, you’ll feel right at home checking out the website. If not, keep reading because I’ll teach you how to do it.)

Ingredients: (Serves 2)

• 1 Tablespoon of coconut oil
• 1 Onion (her recipe says in slices.  I prefer to dice mine)
• 200 g (7 oz) of (beef) Sausage in rounds (slices?)
• 300 g (10.5 oz) of Brussel Sprouts quartered (she likes hers sliced in half)
• 100 g (3.5 oz) Kale (cut up) (In the Netherlands, the kale comes pre-cut to the perfect shape/size)
• 4 eggs
• Pepper
• Salt
• Garlic Powder (I use a garlic grinder…)
• Chili flakes if you like a kick
• Large frying pan
• Lid
• 1/2 cup of water

I like to cut up everything first, but if you’re not a prepping kind of person, throw that tablespoon of coconut oil in a hot pan.

Let it liquify and make sure to swirl the oil to coat the bottom/sides of the pan.

Add the chopped onions and let them get a nice color to them.

Once the onions have a little bit of a brown to them, throw in that sausage.Here I like to add my first round of spices. Some salt, pepper, ground garlic and chili flakes.

Stir the sausage and make sure it gets nice and browned on all sides.

Add in the brussel sprouts.

Cooke them until they’re a nice bright green. This takes a few minutes. I usually add a bit more pepper here. (I LOVE PEPPER!!!)

Time for the kale.  Add the kale.

It may feel like your pan is totally overflowing.  That’s okay.  Add in about a half cup of water to create a nice steaming effect and put a lid on your pan. This will help the kale to compress a bit into the pan making it easier to stir in the next step.

Let it sit for maybe a minute until the kale kind of cooks a bit and turns brighter green.

Remove the lid, stir everything again so it’s all mixed, and make it nice and even throughout the pan.

Crack the four eggs (one at a time) over the bed of kale, brussel sprouts and sausage.

Replace the lid again.  Let it sit for 3-5 minutes.

The eggs will cook and turn a creamy white/opaque color.

You can add some more spices on your eggs while they cook if you want to (obviously I did).  If you like runny eggs, cook them closer to three minutes.  If you like more solid eggs, cook them closer to five minutes.

I really enjoy scrambling the eggs through the dish at around the four minute mark and then take the pan off the heat.

Serve yourself a nice bowl full and enjoy a healthy and hearty meal!

(I cooked everything on a high heat… but you can do the last steps on a lower heat)

21 Things You Need To Know About Providence Before You Move There

Welcome to the smallest state’s capital—while it’s small in stature, this city is huge on culture, art, food and… puppets?

I’m from Providence, and this city is so full of fun, culture and good food! I honestly can’t recommend it enough to people visiting the United State… especially the East Coast.  It’s a 1 hour train ride from Boston and a 3 hour train ride from NYC!

If you see my previous post I talk about a lot of my favorite restaurants which are some amazing 5 Star places in Providence!

So proud to be from this little state with a big personality!

21 Things You Need To Know About Providence Before You Move There

Foods…

The night before last, as I sat on our balcony staring at the sunset while swirling my wine, the first thing…well the first person… that popped into my mind was my sister; mainly because I was swirling my wine, and well, my sister is living in Italy… and she likes wine, so I texted her just to check up on things.

We got to talking and we landed where we land a lot.. talking about food.  This time, it was food we missed.  We talked about what Job and I made for dinner and how she was jealous…and then a small story about peanut butter… but really her list of things she missed was just glorious.

So really, here is just my list from notes of foods that I miss… to be clear, originally I was going to make a post of just foods I missed and then restaurants that I missed, but at this point, I’ll just let you see the list I have.

Most missed American foods

• Maple syrup (Vermont)
• Cabot’s Seriously sharp cheddar cheese
• Chobani/oikos
• Annies Mac & cheese
• Kraft Mac & cheese
• Mint chocolate chip ice cream
• Skittles (All of the fun flavors!)
• Sour patch watermelons
• Sabra roasted pine nut hummus
• Dunkin donuts caramel swirl iced latte
• Dunkin donuts turkey cheddar bacon on a French roll
• Maple & brown sugar Quaker oat instant oatmeal
• Moms cooking!!!
• Chipotle, Specifically a burrito bowl with chips and guac
• Julian’s..their Brunch.
• Nick’s on Broadway…their french toast OMG.
• Broadway Bistro …their menu changes weekly I believe…
• Tokyo
• Nice slice their BBQ chicken, Greek, and La Strada pizza are amazing.
• And…I can’t say that I miss this place, but man oh man I cannot wait to try Hudson Street Deli, one of my old co-worker’s new places!

Anyways, this is a running list… so I’m sure I will think of more things I’m missing… now I’m really hungry.

And for those of you who are interested in trying some amazing local cuisine in Providence, RI, try some of those above listed spots!!!!

As an expat, or just when you travel, what foods do you miss the most from home?

Dutch Pancakes

So everyone knows about American pancakes, the fluffy, sweet golden mouthfuls of awesome… but recently I found out that the Dutch make pancakes too… except they’re very different.

I’m not usually hungry right when I get out of bed, so a lot of the time it’s really hard for me to think about breakfast, where as as soon as Job is awake, all he can think is food food food.  

This morning, after Job had woken up and showered and made his own breakfast, I slid out of bed, made him an espresso and wished him a good day at work… and then I sat right back down on the couch and woke up.  I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to eat so I just sat there and caught up on a few TV shows while I contemplated.  

I didn’t want to make something that took a ton of effort and I definitely didn’t want eggs… and then I remembered! I know something easy and you don’t need a lot of ingredients and it takes almost no time… so here it is!

Ingredients: (Yields about 4 pancakes depending on your consistency)

1 Egg

Some Milk

Some Flour

*Apples

*Bacon

*Cheese

*These work great as toppings if you don’t want plain pancakes.

So here it goes, the easiest recipe ever.

Get a bowl.  Crack the egg into it.  Add milk. (I used what was left in my milk carton, but if I were measuring, I’d say about a  cup of milk…?) Then add some flour.  (Same thing here, but it’s not a measurable science… it’s just a consistency thing.)  Basically you’ll want to add milk and flour until it’s about the consistency of Elmer’s Glue… maybe slightly thinner, but not as thin as paper maché.

At this point, you just need to put a quarter sized dollop of oil into a frying pan (or if you use cooking spray, spray your pan.)

Let the pan heat up so that it’s warm enough to cook your pancakes.  I usually put my pan on medium high heat.  From there, I ladle out (with a ladle) a ladle full of batter into the pan and lift and rotate my pan until the batter basically coats the entire bottom of the pan.  

That is the basis for all of the pancakes.  from here, just let the pancake sit for maybe a minute or until the side start to curl up or the side of the pancake on the pan turns golden brown.  From here, you just flip the pancake and let the other side cook… and that’s about it.

I usually make a test pancake first… to make sure that my pan is hot and to soak up any extra oil if I put too much in the pan… like I said.. this isn’t an exact science.

If I’m making a bacon pancake (they’re amazing) always put the bacon in the pan before you add the batter.  This will ensure that the bacon doesn’t accidentally fall out of the pancake.  Then add the batter and just swirl it around the pan to make sure you coat all of the bacon and cook normally the rest of the way.

For any other topping, like cheese or fruits, put the batter in the pan normally and then add the topping.  For chunky additions, like fruits, i always make sure to drizzle a little extra batter on top of the fruits to hold them in.  For cheese, since it melts in nicely, I normally push it firmly into the batter when I place it in the pan.

Once the pancake is done, I just move it to a plate (as pictured above) 

The last thing you have to do is simply enjoy.  I like to fill mine with Stroop (which is the Dutch version of maple syrup.. it’s great, but it’s not maple-y!)

and just like in the picture on the stroop bottle, that is how I eat my pancakes! Enjoy!

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The amazing food I shared with Job in Amsterdam

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Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.

 -André Simon

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Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

-James Beard

Welcome!

This is The Traveling Spoons, and we are Job and Hannah.

In October of 2012, the two of us were fortunate enough to have been selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants from our global company for a special project in California.  I flew in to California from Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States, and Job flew in a day earlier, from Amsterdam.  The second we met, sparks started flying and before the day was out… well, we kind of started to fall in love.  With the group of people we were working with, and a healthy per diem, we had great food, met cool people, and had an amazing time.

About a year before Job and I met, he was sent to London for our company and was put on a significant per diem for his food expenses. During this time, he sauntered around the city looking for posh hot spots with great food.  It was all this amazing “free” food that inspired him to start…collecting, we’ll say, spoons from each restaurant he visited. He had this great idea to use the spoons as a sort of a rating tool for his food blog that he was excited to start… but it never really took off when he had the idea.

Fast forward to now… and about 150 spoons later (or something close to that), we are here to launch this amazing blog together.  Here we are going to share the amazing food we find in experience together in our travels, from lil’ Rhody to Amsterdam and everywhere in between.  We’ll share stories about our travels, recipes we love, recipes we find, recipes we try, and recipes we want to try. We’ll share more of our story together, and most of all, post pictures of all of this amazing food.  We hope you enjoy all of this love… love of food, people, traveling, and each other, and maybe even try a recipe or two.  

For now though, welcome to The Traveling Spoons! We’re really excited to have you!

Hannah & Job