Inspiration

Recently, my brother moved to a 5+ acre bit of land in North Carolina. He has, among other creatures, over two dozen chickens. He's had a few chickens for quite awhile, but a big batch of them are young and just started producing eggs. Currently, he's getting about a dozen eggs a day. When spring comes around, he'll be getting more.

I think he's getting a bit tired of omelets, as he turned to me for suggestions on what to cook. He tries not to eat horribly unhealthy foods, which he sees as limiting what he can do with his egg bounty. When I was on the phone with him, I taught him how to make simple popovers, which were a big hit. I'll be sending him a list of other ideas, but I wanted to ask you all for suggestions.

There are a lot of things out there (not just baked goods) that use a surprisingly large number of eggs. What have you come across that's been great?

These are super-high-quality, ultra-fresh eggs produced by happy free-range chickens. What foods have you seen that really highlight the quality of the eggs used in them?

Can you help a brother out? Leave your suggestions below.

Sometimes, you need to make do with what you have.

Sometimes, what you have is dried parsley flakes.

There's no use crying about it. The parsley in your refrigerator went bad a couple of days ago. You didn't manage to preserve it. You don't have time to run out and get more. Your eyes turn to your spice rack. There's a jar there that's labeled Parsley. You're not sure you believe it. You don't believe everything you read.

You open the jar. You smell it. It smells a bit like parsley, but the aroma is fainter than you are fully comfortable with. At least it hasn't gone musty.

In a flash of inspiration, you put a tablespoon or so into a ramekin with some water and swirl it around. You watch as the dried leaves smooth out and their color brightens. You take a deep breath. The aroma of parsley has intensified. You smile.

On Halloween, we had a pomegranate. I like pomegranate quite a bit, but Angela is a huge fan. Halloween seems like a particularly appropriate time for them, both because they are in season and because they have associations with the underworld.

When Angela broke it open, I suggested that she separate the seeds in a large bowl under water. I'd read that the pomegranate pulp floats while the seeds sink to the bottom of the bowl. This is, in fact, true. It made separating the seeds into a remarkably quick job. In moments, we had a bowl full of shining pomegranate seeds.

Perhaps it was because it was Halloween and I was attuned to the idea of things being in costume, but I was struck by how similar pomegranate seeds looked to corn kernels. I promptly ran to the freezer, where we had some frozen corn, and retrieved a single kernel for the sake of comparison. I'd never noticed the similarity before. They are the same size. Their structure is similar. The primary visual differences are color and degree of translucency. I'm tempted to play off of this somehow and use both corn and pomegranate seeds in a dish. Possibly some sort of salsa?

http://food.theatlantic.com/menus/12-ways-to-play-with-your-food-1.php

(Not that the ideas are bad, mind you.)

Ideas In Food is the blog of Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, a team of chef-consultants based in New York City. The two also write the Kitchen Alchemy column for Popular Science online.