Panini Press Recipes from the Road: Brunch of Leftovers

One of the only things that’s tough for me when I’m on an epic road trip is that I don’t always have the opportunity to cook. I have been in Boise, Idaho for the better part of a week at a very cute AirBnB whose only deficiency is that it has no kitchen (though it does have a dorm fridge).

But I picked up a $5 panini press at a local thrift shop and I’m starting to get the idea that this very well may be the ideal “road warrior” cooking implement. Check out this beautiful brunch dish I assembled from leftover sweet potato fries, a leftover chorizo sausage and piperade, chives I found growing in the yard and one of the eggs I bought before I knew I didn’t have a kitchen:

It’s in a takeout box because that’s all my local coffee shop had when I went out for my three-shot Americano. It worked nicely as a bowl, though, since I had my runny egg yolk mixing with the potatoes, sausage and pepper-and-eggplant chutney.

Please enjoy my step by step tutorial on how to cook without a kitchen in your AirBnB. (Fortunately I did bring along a paring knife and I bought a spatula when I bought the panini press!) You’ll notice my Boise Weekly ‘cutting board,’ and that I used the handle of my fork to get the top heating element close to the egg without smooshing it.

This is my motley assembly, including two great ingredients from a personal Basque cooking class yesterday (stay tuned for a full post on that) and a box of sweet potato fries coated with Togarashi salt from the Boise Fry Company, post on that coming soon too.

Newspapers are great for a lot of things! This one was a good cutting board for the Basque chorizo-related sausage ‘chistorra.’

I didn’t have any oil to keep the egg from sticking to the panini press, but I figured (right) that the chistorra would exude some.

How to make a runny-yolked egg without it, well, running everywhere? I decided to make a little nest out of the sweet potato fries to hold the egg.

The beauty of this press is it has two heating elements, but it doesn’t have a mechanism to stop before it runs into the food. So I created a stop with my fork — I bet a wood block would be good too since eggs would be long cooked before the wood started to smolder.

Here it is, post cooking. You’ll see the top of the yolk started to set up but the middle was still very runny. It came off no problem in one solid raft of egg and fries, partly because the press is non-stick and partly from the chistorra oil.

This was really pretty good, and weeks into this trip, exactly the price I could afford.