The Fresh Eggs Daily Cookbook | Lisa Steele
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Lisa Steele: Hi, I'm Lisa Steele, and my latest book is the Fresh Eggs Daily Cookbook.
Suzy Chase: Could you please read the first chapter of the introduction?
Lisa Steele: Thin tendrils of sunlight slowly move across the field in the still gray pre-dawn hours, touching briefly on the dewdrops, glistening on pink clover blossoms and white daisy. Only the gentle swoosh of a heron's flapping wings can be heard. Then, a woodpecker knocks on a pine tree and a chipmunk chides him from a perch hidden high in the branches, as small songbirds trill from their nest and hear in the air bees flip from flower to flower. I'm still asleep in the cozy home on our small Maine farm where we've lived for the past seven years, after trading a Wall Street life for rural living.
Suzy Chase: How did you find your way back to a small town life after being on Wall Street?
Lisa Steele: It was a really, really long journey, but I don't think that I could have gotten away from it. I think that every move that I made was sort of leading me back here without me realizing it. I grew up on a farm in rural Massachusetts. Went to college, got a degree in accounting, ended up on Wall Street.
Lisa Steele: And long story short, I did that for, I don't know, five or six years. Started to get really burnt out, realized it wasn't where I belonged. So I quit, walked out and opened a bookstore, ironically enough. I've always loved to read. And I ran the bookstore on Long Island for a couple of years and then met my husband, who was in the Navy, stationed in Florida. And so that started my journey from Florida, then slowly moved back up. New England to Virginia and now to Maine, again, living on a farm, raising chickens.
Suzy Chase: I'd love for you to talk about naming your chickens. And first, how many do you have, and why is Miranda your favorite?
Lisa Steele: We have 18 chickens, 10 ducks, and two geese. They tend to have names like Charlotte, Miranda. They are not named after the Sex and the City girls, although I was a huge fan, but completely different batches of chickens. That was a coincidence. Violet, Amanda, Abigail. I tend to go for those old-fashiony kind of names. Sometimes, based on their breed. So if it's a French breed, I might try to find a French name, or if it's an English breed or whatever.
Lisa Steele: Miranda is gray and white, she's really pretty. She's a Splash Marans, which is a French breed. They lay a dark brown eggs, but for some reason she just reminded me of Miranda Priestly's hair from the Devil Wears Prada. When she was a baby chicken I just looked at her and I was like, "You're Miranda." Fortunately, she has a much better personality than Miranda Priestly does, so that all worked out really well.
Suzy Chase: In this cookbook you share an enormous amount of information, recipes and photos, in a way that makes this book the standard for egg cooking. I have to tell you, I was a little skeptical about an egg cookbook, because oftentimes one-subject cookbooks fall flat. But your recipes are intriguing, and this cookbook is a must have for any cookbook lover. I'm going to leave it out on my kitchen table.
Lisa Steele: You're so sweet. When I decided to write a cookbook, which is a whole story in itself, but I just knew it had to be an egg cookbook because that's what I do. Our life revolves around all the eggs that we collect and have to eat. And my publisher at the time was in your camp at first and didn't see that an egg cookbook would work. And he wanted me to do more of a farm-to-table type cookbook, which I think has been done and overdone so many times. It's been done really well, it's been done really badly. I wasn't interested at all.
Lisa Steele: And then he wanted me to do maybe a seasonal cookbook, which didn't interest me at all either. And I really stuck to my guns and said, "I want to do an egg-centric cookbook," and ended up moving away from that publisher, hiring an agent. Getting a new publisher who really saw my vision. And I was so excited as soon as I talked to first, an agent who was the fifth or sixth I had talked to I think, and then a publisher who got it and was as excited as I was. And really saw that there was a hole in the cookbook market.
Lisa Steele: I've read so many egg cookbooks. I bought a whole bunch of them on Amazon when I was formulating the idea, looked through them. And I feel like they all were kind of missing something, they weren't the type of cookbook that I would use on a daily basis either. There were just a bunch of recipes with an egg thrown on top, which isn't really a cookbook. I mean, I can do that myself, just put an egg on whatever I make. Or they were recipes that were so involved or took so many ingredients that they weren't something I could see myself making over and over again.
Lisa Steele: So I wanted something where you'd have all your classics, omelets, frittatas, quiches, plus creme brulee and poundcake and angel food cake. And those kind of things when you have a lot of eggs and you don't know what to do with them. But also some fun and unique things, like the eggs and the butternut squash, or baked eggs and toast cups, or making your own marshmallows or mayonnaise, sprinkles, things like that.
Suzy Chase: And you also have salads and soups in this cookbook too.
Lisa Steele: I do. And that wasn't something ... I mean, I just wanted really two chapters, sweet and savory. And they said, "Well, you can't have a cookbook with just two chapters. We have to break it out more than that." And I don't like to really put things into slot. We all sometimes have fried eggs and toast and bacon for dinner, so I don't necessarily consider eggs breakfast foods. And how do you decide if something is a brunch food or a breakfast food, but they sort of made me come up with some other chapters.
Lisa Steele: I do love Caesar salad. I have to say that making your own Caesar salad dressing and your own croutons and everything, it just, it elevates the salad. I'm not a huge salad eater, but I did manage to come up with a couple that we do have on a regular rotation.
Suzy Chase: You say if you want eggs from healthy and happy chickens, buy certified human pasture-raised, not organic. For us home cooks, how do we know if they're certified human pasture-raised? That's hard to say, that's a mouth full.
Lisa Steele: Yeah. It is. And egg carton label have gotten so confusing. Even my mom, she usually buys one brand and that we've talked about and I've told her, the chickens are out in a field and we presume they're happy and all this other stuff. Well, her store didn't of the brand that she usually buys the last time she went so she had to buy a different brand.
Lisa Steele: And I was talking to her on the phone and she was so proud of herself because she said, "I looked at all the labels and tried to remember what you told me. And I bought cage-free. And it says no antibiotics and no hormones, so I think these eggs are pretty good." And I was like, "Mom, first of all, chickens can not be given antibiotics or hormones in this country." There's so many things on the label that really mean nothing, like farm fresh, natural. These kind of terms don't really mean anything.
Lisa Steele: Really what you want to look for is pasture-raised. That means the chickens are legit out on a pasture, running around, laying in the sun, doing happy chicken things. Whereas cage-free just means they're not in cages, but they're just roaming around in a huge warehouse. Organic means the chickens have been fed organic feed. So if eating organic is important to you, then that is a label you can look for.
Lisa Steele: But people just need to realize that organic does not refer to the treatment of the chickens, so they can still have beaks trimmed. They can be forced to molt by turning on, turning off the lights and things like that. So pasture-raised really is what you want to look ... If you're just looking for one thing on a carton.
Suzy Chase: God, I'm going to really have to read my cartons from now on, because I don't think I've ever noticed the term certified human pasture-raised.
Lisa Steele: It's probably in a little seal on the cart somewhere.
Suzy Chase: Okay.
Lisa Steele: And checking the freshness of the egg is super important too.
Suzy Chase: You mean the date?
Lisa Steele: Right.
Suzy Chase: So what should we be looking for in terms of the timeframe?
Lisa Steele: Well, they make it sort of confusing, because sometimes there's a best-buy date or a sell-by date. You can just ignore those because those are really meaningless. You want to look for the three digit code on the end of the carton from zero, zero, one to three, six, five. That is the day that those eggs were put in that carton.
Lisa Steele: What is today? February something. So it's probably the 30, I don't know, six or 37th day of the year. So if you are at the grocery store today, you want to look for the number that's closest to today's date, because that means that those eggs are the freshest. You don't want to see a cart that says 248 or something like that, because those were put in the carton at the end of last year. And I mean, they can sit on a grocery store shelf for weeks, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks.
Suzy Chase: Now, can we leave our eggs out on our counter?
Lisa Steele: Store-bought, no. Because in the United States, they are required to wash them. Which really is a shame because this is one of the few countries in the world where eggs have to be washed. Most countries they're sold unwashed, which really is a better way. An egg has a natural coating on it. Just before it's laid the hen applies this invisible coating that is called the bloom. And it basically covers up the pores on the eggshell, which keeps air and bacteria out. So that's the egg's natural defense to keep it fresh, to keep bacteria from getting into the egg.
Lisa Steele: And here in the United States, they're required to wash eggs if they're going to be sold commercially and that washes that protective coating right off. So commercial store-bought eggs have to be refrigerated. If you get eggs from a neighbor, from your own chickens, from a local farm, as long as they haven't been washed, they can stay out on the counter. I don't know, two to three weeks. They do age faster if they're left out on the counter, so they'll stay fresh seven times longer if you do refrigerate them.
Suzy Chase: You also tell us to store eggs pointy side down. How come?
Lisa Steele: That is really important. The yolk of an egg is held in place top to bottom in an egg with these thin ropes of protein. You store them pointing them down because that way the protein ropes are keeping the yolk not from rising to the top of the egg that way. But side to side, it's also going to stay in the middle.
Suzy Chase: So how clever is this? You included a recipe index for the number of eggs needed in this cookbook. I love that.
Lisa Steele: That was really important to me. And that's something that I didn't see. I think there was one other cookbook I saw that next to each recipe, it would have one egg or two eggs or three eggs or whatever. And I thought that was super helpful because maybe for people who don't keep chickens, but definitely when you do have chickens, there are times a year when they lay so many eggs that you don't know what to do with them.
Lisa Steele: But it could be also, you bought a dozen at this store and nobody wanted breakfast that week. Now you've got 12 eggs and what are you going to do with them? So of course you make an angel food cake.
Suzy Chase: I would love to chat about some of these recipes. I made your double dill scrambled eggs on page 50, but I couldn't find Havarti with dill so I just used plain Havarti.
Lisa Steele: More dill.
Suzy Chase: And a lot dill. I love dill. Can you talk a little bit about this recipe?
Lisa Steele: Yeah, I love dill too. I actually saw on your Instagram stories that you had made it and you couldn't find the Havarti with dill so I don't know if that's regional or not, because we always seem to have it at the grocery stores here. But I love dill. I mean, it's probably one of my top three herbs, and I think it's something that's not necessarily as common. Super easy to grow, we grow it in the garden every year.
Lisa Steele: But it just pairs really, really well with eggs and using that Havarti, which is a nice, mild, creamy cheese. I think it pairs really, really well with the dill. I mean, you could eat scrambled eggs every day probably for a year, and just adding different cheese and herb combinations, it's a completely different meal.
Suzy Chase: Okay. I also made fried eggs with apricot jam and goat cheese on page 57. And my 15-year-old was a little skeptical, but he loved it.
Lisa Steele: That is one of the stranger recipes in the book I have to admit. My mom got so excited when she found out I was writing a cookbook. And probably on a weekly or biweekly basis, she would send me an envelope full of egg recipes that she had found in magazines or written down on cards or whatever. And this is actually something that she makes all the time. So when I promised her that I would use one of the recipes she had sent in the cookbook, it was funny because I actually ended up using her original recipe.
Lisa Steele: I had it once, she made it for me and I was like, "This is so weird," but it really, it works. And I love how the jelly kind of looks like the egg yolk and the cheese kind of looks like the egg white, but I thought it was just weird enough that it might prompt people to try it. And it's definitely something that nobody's ever had before.
Suzy Chase: Totally. And you're right, it looks so pretty.
Lisa Steele: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Suzy Chase: This morning I was up at the crack of dawn, because I have a teen, and I made your fig French toast sandwich on page 98. You discovered this a recipe when you wanted to make a grilled cheese sandwich, can you tell me about that?
Lisa Steele: Somehow we had no cheese, which never happens, but I did have cream cheese. And I was like, "You know, I could probably make a grilled cream cheese sandwich," and then who doesn't love fig jam. I mean, I'm just huge fan of fig jam. And the two together, again, kind of a weird combination, but I pretty much guarantee nobody's ever had that before.
Suzy Chase: I like the fig jam, because it's not too sweet.
Lisa Steele: Exactly.
Suzy Chase: On your Fresh Eggs Daily blog you write about the experience of writing your first cookbook, and you called it a mix of excitement and low level panic. Talk a little bit about your dream of writing a cookbook coming true. And a little bit of that timeline, starting in September, 2020 when you signed the contract .and your transparency was a breath of fresh air for me.
Lisa Steele: Oh thank you. Yeah, as I mentioned, I think I mentioned when we first started, I've written six books on raising chickens. And they naturally came out of the blog, it was the topic that I'm really familiar with. I'm good at raising chicken, they're all healthy. I've been giving advice for years, so I feel really comfortable writing about chicken, but it wasn't my true passion. It started to feel like a job. So writing a cookbook has been something that's been a dream for years. Being a food blogger and writing a cookbook, and it all just seems something that would never happen, but it's a great bucket list thing to check off.
Lisa Steele: And I decided if I'm going to do it, I'm going to have to make it happen. I found this editor who was just super excited about it. And then when he pitched it to the new HarperCollins imprint that was going to be focusing on cookbooks for the most particular, and they loved it too. I felt like this was really going to happen, but then I realized I had absolutely no idea how to write a cookbook. I'm not a recipe tester or recipe developer, or food photographer or anything like that. So I was like, "Oh-oh, what have I gotten myself into here?"
Suzy Chase: I just want anyone who's even thinking about writing a cookbook to read your Fresh Eggs Daily blog about this, because you go into such detail.
Lisa Steele: It's hard because no one really comes out and tells you, so you have to read a bunch of things and then put it all together in your mind. I wanted to make sure that I was as transparent as I could be without actually ... I mean, there were certain things that you're just not supposed to talk about, I guess I could say.
Lisa Steele: But I wanted it to be helpful for someone and really encourage someone, that if this is something you want to do, it might be possible. Never in a million years would I think that I would get a cookbook deal, especially from one of the largest publishers in the world. And I know that it's because of my chicken audience. Bottom line, a publisher just wants to sell books.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why. And for this segment, it can only be one person.
Lisa Steele: My first thought, and I'm going to cheat here because I'm going to give you my first thought and then my final, but my first thought would be Reese Witherspoon, just because she's raised chickens. She's lived in the country. I think she's amazing and so motivated. And she loves books and cookbooks and all that.
Lisa Steele: But I have to go with Emily Blunt because I have been watching some interviews with her, with her husband and also with The Rock for her new movie. She's hysterical. And I can not imagine someone who would be more fun to eat dinner with. And I don't care if she likes eggs or chickens or anything, I think she'll be an amazing dinner partner.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Lisa Steele: Super easy. Fresh Eggs Daily, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest. My blog is fresheggsdaily.com
Suzy Chase: To purchase the Fresh Eggs Daily Cookbook and support podcast, head over to cookerybythebook.com. And thanks Lisa for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Lisa Steele: Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.
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