Saturday 29 November 2014

Here's What Happens When You Ask Marcus Samuelsson To Make You Breakfast

In our new series BuzzFeed Breakfast, we invite a chef to hang out and cook stuff. Then we show you how to recreate what he or she did.

Design by Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed. Photos by Lauren Zaser / BuzzFeed

Yes, Marcus Samuelsson is a James Beard award-winning chef with a successful Manhattan restaurant and recurring TV gigs on shows like Chopped and The Taste . He was also the youngest chef ever, at 24, to receive three stars from the New York Times, which means he knows how to cook seriously high-end, fancy food.

His new cookbook isn't about fancy food, though. Marcus Off Duty is a guide to straightforward but delicious home cooking. "Home cooking is now where many of my restaurant dishes start," Samuelsson wrote in the book's intro. "I ask my cooks what they make at home and how they make it." The recipes are all about using familiar ingredients in creative ways.

Samuelsson is especially adamant about using leftovers to create new (often even more delicious) dishes the next day. He did just that when he came to the BuzzFeed test kitchen recently to cook a dish for our new BuzzFeed Breakfast series, whipping up a frittata with leftover spaghetti and an impromptu skillet of eggs cooked in leftover tomato sauce. "Cooking for me is like jazz," he wrote in his book. "You start with a solid base and add riffs and beats as you feel the need." The recipe shown below is just that — a base. Once you understand the basic steps, you can use them as a framework to turn any combination of leftover pasta, meat and sauce into a hearty breakfast the next morning.

The first step in making a leftover pasta frittata is figuring out what kind of leftovers you're working with. Here's what we had:

Two kinds of spaghetti, tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese, spinach, and some cornbread. In the fridge we also had garlic, thyme, eggs, milk, sour cream, and some cooked bacon.