Croque Madame

[Sepia]

An easy lunch, quite good and very open for interpretation and changes. Note that this is a bastardized version for poor hungover students.

You'll need:
2 eggs
4 slices of bread
cheese (cheddar will work but anything with some bite and taste will suffice)
dijon

optional:
bacon
tomatoes
salad
a fist of basil leaves
leek
kecap manis

If you're going for the full package:

Assemble the slices of bread together with the cheese and the bacon. Toast it in any way you or prefer, oven or a tabletop toaster or between two hot bricks. Fry the eggs at low heat, 2/6 is what I use on my electric stove as it takes about a cigarette from I've cracked the eggs untill they're done.

Take a plate, add the amounts of salad you wish to eat. Add tomatoes, leek and basil on top of that. Sprinkle LIGHTLY with kecap manis, this stuff tastes alot and for this course we only want the sweet/salt undertones, no dominance. When the toasts are done, put them on top of the greens and add a thin layer of dijon on top of them. Put the eggs on the toasts so that it looks like two breasts made of bread and eggs. Sprinkle pepper and serve.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

What is kecap manis?

[Rumckle]

What is kecap manis?

It's a thick sweet soy sauce, tasty stuff.

Also that recipe sounds rather nice, Sepia

[Triple Zero]

What is kecap manis?

ketjap manis. indonesian sweet soy sauce (ketjap = soy sauce, manis = sweet). there's also ketjap asin, which is the salty variant, but in that case i usually prefer to use japanese soy sauce instead.

Sepia, question, i think it's funny how you switched the 'c' for a 'tj', which is probably the way it's written in finland (or norway, i forget where you live for a moment), but i was wondering shouldn't it have one of those funky marks on top of it to make it the 'tj' sound? like this: ketčap manis?

though it's really odd/funny to see an indonesian word written with mid-european characters

[East Coast Hustle]

my indonesian cookbook spells it "kecap manis".

[Darth Cupcake]

MMmmm. Croque madame was one of my favorite foods in Paris. I'd get them every Friday pretty much. So delicious. I've tried to make them here and just haven't succeeded very well.

[Sepia]

It says Kecap Manis on the bottle. It was something I bought quite the long time ago having no idea what it was or where it came from. If I'm to toss a salad that will function as a sidething, I usually mix the kecap 50/50 with lime. Works really well. Spelling, I have no idea. Most norwegians and most norwegian cooks have no idea what it is, still trying to get accustomed to kikkoman I guess.

There's also a different version that takes lots more time but is fucking delicious. For that you'll need two slices of sourdough bread, the rustique type. You can make it at home with a 5days sour if you don't have a decent bakery where you live. Take one of the slices and place it in a very hot dry grill pan and fry just enough for it to get marks. Let it cool and cover it with some nice smelly brie. Take the other slice and put lots of strips of bacon on it before you throw it into the oven at about 100 celsius, slowcooking the bacon, letting the fat seep into the bread. When the bacon has gone whitish and limp, take the slice with brie and stick it into the oven, let it sit there for about a cigarette, which should also be your cue for the egg.
Instead of the kecap manis, use 1 part dijon, 1 part honey, a dash of mustard seeds and a wee bit of coconut milk and let it sit in the fridge for a night. Serve this with amadine potatoes (the small french ones) marinated in lime, lemon, ample amounts of fat (butter will do if you dont have bacon or goose available). Put the potatoes and everything else in a form and let it sit in your oven untill al dente.


The kecap discussion also reminds me of another recipe; Take a few scallops, let them sit in cumin seeds (seeds, not ground is very important) for a few hours in the fridge, you want to cover roughly half of the scallops in these seeds. While they sit there, take an eating spoon (?) with kecap manis in a bowl and add the juice and pulp of half a grapefruit. Fry the scallops in a dry pan untill evenly heated. Make a base of the crispiest salads you can get your hands on, add the kecap/grapefruit and put the scallops on top. Sprinkle with pepper and maldon. Works quite well as an appetizer.

[East Coast Hustle]

sounds good.

what's "maldon"?

[Sepia]

sounds good.

what's "maldon"?

Salt. http://www.maldonsalt.co.uk/

The best salt I've tasted so far but I'm open to anything else..

[East Coast Hustle]

baie de garand.

[Triple Zero]

my indonesian cookbook spells it "kecap manis".

ah then it's probably just the Dutch spelling it phonetically.

an eating spoon (?)

tablespoon.

(just trying to be helpful, not nitpicky--you guys wouldn't know how much english culinary vocabulary i picked up from this subforum)

[Sepia]

my indonesian cookbook spells it "kecap manis".

ah then it's probably just the Dutch spelling it phonetically.

an eating spoon (?)

tablespoon.

(just trying to be helpful, not nitpicky--you guys wouldn't know how much english culinary vocabulary i picked up from this subforum)

No please, my writing when doing stuff like recipes is shit so any errors in the wrong use of fry, cook or eating spoon is much appreciated.

[Triple Zero]

i love looking up these english culinary terms on wikipedia or some other resource. usually it teaches me 1) what is meant by it, 2) a new cooking tip or trick and 3) that the (english speaking) person making the post has been using the wrong term to describe what they actually meant