Here’s another Simply Delicious recipe that exists outside of this book: 5-19: Eggs en Cocotte is a version of a pretty well-known French way to cook eggs. Variably known as shirred eggs (although that’s slightly different), this is a really easy (and delicious) breakfast or lunch option.
Cocotte has a rather interesting meaning outside of the culinary world–I’ll leave it to you to find out. 👄
I used large-ish ceramic ramekins for this (the same I used for 15-1: Lemon Mousse & 15-2: Chocolate Mousse), but they suggest muffin tins are OK too.
Ingredients. I was out of half-and-half and/or milk, so I just replaced the 4 tbsp with water. It works fine, if you’re looking to cut a few calories from the dish or just happen to be out of milk.
Putting these egg dishes on a sheet pan makes them easier to handle when getting in and out of the oven.
I recently bought a new immersion blender after foolishly giving away the one I had been gifted before–I really never used it, mostly out of not knowing what to do with it. After my restaurant stint where we used a very large one for various tasks, I decided it was time to try again.
Since nonuse was my problem before, I’ve made it a point to incorporate it more often. Here, I used it to blend the cream cheese with the other ingredients. While my intentions were good, this probably wasn’t a big enough portion to require its use.
Cracked an egg into each cup and started spooning in the cream cheese mixture.
Doesn’t look that majestic, but you know it’ll taste good.
Sprinkled cheese on top (a cheddar-jack blend, since that seems to cover the most bases in cooking) and dotted with butter.
After baking. I let these go a bit longer than I wanted–they were taking a while to get brown on top. I think I should have done them in the toaster oven instead of the big oven–they would have browned faster without cooking the eggs quite so hard.
Topped with a bit of sliced chives and served with some diner-style potatoes (homemade–another lesson from working quite a few brunch services) drizzled with sriracha. For a Saturday morning breakfast, it was pretty delicious.
Grade: A
