Put An Egg On It!

Tonight, I made a dinner which was surprisingly quick, easy and tasty!  I was tired when I got home, so all three were a necessity if we were to avoid ordering delivery.

Here is the cell phone pic of questionable quality:

The above is bow tie pasta, with garlic, mushrooms, spinach and cherry tomatoes, with a soft-poached egg on top.

Here's how to pull it together yourself:

Noodles (I used bow tie, but use whatever shape you have on hand)
1 bunch spinach, washed, dried and roughly chopped
1/2 pint of cherry tomatoes
3 large white mushrooms (or a bunch of smaller ones), sliced
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion, diced (optional)
lemon juice or balsamic vinegar (optional)
1 egg per person
water & plain white vinegar for poaching
oil for sauteing
salt, pepper and grated parmesan to taste

Start your noodles as per package directions.
In a large frying pan, heat some oil.  If using the onion, add it first, and saute/stir until starting to soften.  Then add your mushrooms and cook for 2-5 minutes.  When the mushrooms have started to get some colour, add your spinach.  When the spinach is mostly wilted, add the tomatoes and a splash of lemon juice or balsamic (if using).  Keep this on low heat, while the remaining items cook.
When the noodles are pretty much done, drain, reserving a little bit of cooking liquid, then add to your pan of vegetables and stir.  Add some cooking liquid if necessary, to keep things from drying out.  Keep this on low heat/warm, while doing your eggs.
If you know how to poach eggs already, awesome!  I'm not great at it, and if you don't know how, you probably shouldn't learn how from me.  If you know how, soft poach your eggs.  If you don't, a soft boiled, sunny side up or over easy egg will work too - or you could search for a good tutorial.

Serve up your pasta, top with your runny egg, and sprinkle with parmesan, salt & pepper to taste.
When you bust your egg open, the yolk will run everywhere and help make a delicious coating on your noodles.

Enjoy!

Potato Cup Things With Eggs & Veg

Earlier today, this recipe quite literally landed on my doorstep, as part of today's newspaper.  They call the recipe Potato Nest Frittatas, but to me a frittata is more of an egg pie/cake sort of thing.  This is more like eggs in a nest.

So, I gave the recipe a bit of a spin for supper, except that I substituted a bit (and by a bit, I mean a lot).  I only made 5 egg-potato cups, just for reference.

I didn't have any russet potatoes, and the recipe calls for baking them in the oven and then letting them chill overnight.  I think this animated gif sums up my feelings this instruction:

I instead scrubbed two medium yellow potatoes (and one sweet potato, just to see how it would fare in the recipe) and microwaved them until they were cooked.  Then I stuck them in the freezer for 5 minutes, until they were cool enough to handle.  I probably should have left them in the freezer longer, as I discovered a few rogue pockets of steam while grating them.

The sweet potato was not as firm as the regular potatoes, so it was more half grated-half mashed, but they still made nice potato cups (I got 2 sweet potato cups and 3 yellow potato in total).

I put finely minced red onion, mushrooms, yellow sweet pepper and cream cheese in the potato cup, before cracking the egg in.  They only just fit in my standard size muffin tin.

Getting them out once they were done baking was a bit of an adventure.  I definitely did not grease the sides of the muffin tin cups enough, and the bottoms were still a little soft.  So, definitely check that your muffin tin is very well greased.

In the end though, they turned out to be delicious.  They went really well with buns and spinach salad for dinner.  Even munchkin gobbled her share right up.