Campania

The first dish in this meal was the stuffed eggs. Surprisingly enough, I didn't know how to hard boil eggs before this and my mom had to tell me how long to put them in the water for. Once they were done, I cut them in half and removed the yolks. I mixed the yolk with ricotta, nutmeg, parmigiano, salt and pepper, and replaced the original yolks with this mixture.

I was nervous about breading and frying the eggs, because I didn't think they would hold together through this process, but the yolk mixture stuck the two halves together perfectly and the frying went very smoothly. The eggs were delicious!

The rice used in the timbale was cooked in a very interesting way. I cooked it in boiling water and then drained it like you would with pasta. I then mixed a lot of butter and parmigiano in with the rice. I thought it was interesting that I buttered the bottom of the baking pan and then coated it in breadcrumbs, it made the edge pieces crispy and delicious. If I was going to make this again I would use a smaller baking pan, because I didn't have enough of the rice or zucchini to make 2 complete layers of each. I would also put less butter in with the rice, because it turned out to be a very oily dish.

To make the orange custard I stirred milk, sugar, cornstarch, and egg yolks together on the stove until a pudding texture formed. This was a very tedious process for me because I got impatient after the first 5 minutes of continuous stirring. It was shocking to me how suddenly it thickened.

Once the custard was done, I added orange zest and fresh squeezed orange juice. The oranges I used must have been particularly juicy, because if I had used the juice from all four it wouldn't have been thick enough. I then let it cool in the fridge. We were too full to eat it after the eggs and timbale, but it was an excellent breakfast!