Sarah Cooks Breakfast: Eggs Over Asparagus

"Tomorrow, I'm going to have asparagus for breakfast."

Did you know that eggs and asparagus are delicious together? I know why. It's because eggs are good with everything. (I'm always on the lookout for vegan alternatives, but nothing comes close.)

Asparagus is a fresh choice February through June in the U.S., and this year, seems to be holding strong into July. It cooked so perfectly. Just the right snap to it. You know how sometimes the skin gets rubbery and you have to kind of pull at it with your teeth? Well, it wasn't like that. It was an easy bite.

I went to El Pollo with my grandparents that night and I told them about my perfectly-cooked asparagus. They looked at me like everything I touch turns to gold.

"Wow! How'd you do that?" Grandma said. Aren't grandparents the best at making grandkids feel special?

Eggs Over Asparagus

Ingredients:

Asparagus, ends trimmed

Eggs

Salt and Pepper

Oil and Butter

Hot sauce (optional)

Cheese (optional)

Directions:

1. Melt butter into oil in a skillet.

2. Place asparagus shoots evenly in the skillet. Season with salt. Cook over medium heat for 4-5 minutes.

3. Create space between some of the shoots. Crack eggs into the open spaces. Cook until egg white are firm. Season with pepper, and more salt if you're any of my grandparents.

Blogger Naturally Ella, who created this recipe, suggests blue cheese or goat cheese on top, but I didn't have any cheese, so I added the hot sauce that came with my Lemongrass Thai the night before.

You can see how beautifully her Sunny-Side Up eggs came out. I wasn't so successful in that department, but hey, I'm learning. And it's delicious either way.

Sunny Side Up Eggs over Asparagus
by Naturally Ella

Today's art print is Wild Flowers and Spring Asparagus by Olivia Joy StClaire. It's so fresh and vivid, just like today's recipe.

Eat Your Veggies: Swiss Chard with Prunes and Pine Nuts

“Tomorrow, I’m going to eat more vegetables.”

My routine with greens is almost always the same: garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes.  I totally recommend it.  It tastes great every time, but I’m always looking for new flavors to try with greens. I don’t want to get bored with greens, they’re great for you!

My trusty workhorses.

 This week, I tested out the combination of Swiss Chard with garlic, prunes and pine nuts.  Garlic had remain present because garlic and greens just go together.  

New contenders

The pine nuts were predictably delicious, as they ought to be for their high price tag!  I bought mine at Trader Joe’s, where they are pretty reasonably priced.  You can also substitute pretty much any nut.  

Prunes: a revelation.

Much to my surprise, my favorite part of this dish was the addition of chopped prunes! I hadn’t really eaten prunes before making this.  I bought the bag for a baking project that I later abandoned.  I always assumed they tasted like their puckery juice, but they didn’t! They were plump, sweet and chewy, a great contrast to the astringent plant taste of the chard.  

Sauteed Chard with Prunes and Pine Nuts
(serves 2-ish)

1 bunch Swiss Chard, Rainbow Chard, or any other chard
1 big garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons pine nuts
5 pitted prunes, chopped
olive oil
salt

Rip the leaves from the stems of the chard.  Discard the stems or save for another use. Wash the leaves by submerging them in cold water.  Dry in a salad spinner so that they aren’t dripping wet.  They don’t need to be completely dry, however.

Heat olive oil in a saute pan over medium heat.  Add garlic and pine nuts.  Stir and cook for about 1 minute.  Add chard and prunes.  Cook and stir until chard is wilted, about 4 minutes.  Sprinkle with water if the chard dries out and starts to get crispy.

Remove from heat.  Sprinkle with salt to taste to serve.

Source:  My brain, I’ve seen 3 or 4 recipes for chard with nuts and dried fruit bouncing around the internet lately.

Eat Your Veggies: Thai Brussels Sprouts

“Tomorrow, I’m going to eat more vegetables.”

Eat Your Veggies is a pseudo weekly series featuring easy seasonal veggie recipes.

Brussels Sprouts, for some, conjure memories of being forced to eat bitter, mushy things boiled to death by a well-intentioned yet clueless mother. I think most people who dislike Brussels Sprouts must have had some experience like this, because everyone who hates them does so with unusual fervor.  

Like all variants of cabbage, Brussels Sprouts taste AWFUL when overcooked to the point of mushiness. So don’t do that.  Don’t do that to any vegetables. Especially the green ones, because overcooking breaks down their nutrient content.  

I bought my sprouts on a pre-holiday sale.  They came on a stalk, which I thought was really cool.  They seem fresher like that, and the sprouts were all similarly sized, making cooking a lot simpler.  

Bonus: The stalk doubles as baseball bat.

This recipe flavors the sprouts with fish sauce, which is a Thai condiment made from fermented anchovies. I avoided fish sauce for years because “fermented anchovies” does not sound appetizing, especially to a fish hater like myself.  However, fish sauce doesn’t really taste that fishy.  It actually tastes like richer, more complex soy sauce.  It is very salty and a little bit goes a long way.

If you’re a vegetarian, or I haven’t convinced you that fish sauce is worth trying, use soy sauce instead.

Thai Style Brussels Sprouts

2 cups brussels sprouts
water
canola oil (or any oil of your choosing)
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 teaspoons lime juice
handful of peanuts (or other nut of your choosing)

Bring a large pot of boiling water to a simmer, and have a bowl of very cold ice water at hand.  

Carefully place the brussel sprouts into the simmering water and blanch.  (You want them to be slightly tender. This took my small sprouts 3 minutes.  Err on the side of undercooked!) Remove the sprouts and place in the bowl of ice water.  Dry on paper towels and cut each sprout in half.

Heat about a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over medium high heat.  Add the sprouts and the fish sauce. Cook, stirring occasionally, until sprouts are heated through and browned a bit (about 4 minutes).  Remove to a serving platter.  Sprinkle with lime juice and peanuts.  

Source: Adapted from this recipe from The Kitchn.

Eat Your Veggies: Spiced Spinach

 “Tomorrow, I’m going to eat more vegetables.”

“Eat Your Veggies” is a pseudo-weekly series featuring seasonal, delicious vegetable recipes.

Winter is upon us, which means I have to cheat a little with the “seasonal” aspect of eat your veggies.  In the Pacific Northwest, very little grows over winter. Our farmers markets close up, the CSAs either stop or switch to imported produce, and the little “Washington Grown” tags are scarce in the produce department. Our choices are to either spend the winter subsisting on local potatoes and apples, or switch to imported foods.  

Onions and garlic last all winter!

A few solutions:

• Eat things you’d buy imported anyway, like tropical fruits.
• Citrus and avocado are actually better in winter, and in the PNW, they’re always imported anyway.
• What’s on sale at the supermarket? If its on sale, it is likely in season somewhere relatively nearby.  In the PNW, “relatively nearby” means California.
• Things that are still relatively in season: cabbage, kale, root vegetables.
• Buy frozen produce.  It’s usually packaged in season, when there’s a surplus.
• Freeze or can your own local produce during the spring, summer and fall.  Most things can be frozen with the right preparation. This is the most desirable solution, but requires forethought.

I’ll try to focus on recipes that highlight some of these strategies in the future.  For this week, I bought some spinach that was on sale.  It had a code on the package that allowed me to use HarvestMark.com to see that it was grown in either Southern California or Arizona, and was harvested about 7 days prior to when I purchased it. Not too shabby, for winter!

I ate this with hot sauce and an egg fried in a tortilla.

Spiced Spinach

2 tablespoons Extra Virgin Coconut Oil
1 very small onion, finely chopped (about ⅓ cup chopped)
2 fat cloves of garlic, minced
⅛ tsp ground cumin
⅛ tsp powdered mustard
⅛ tsp red pepper flakes
3 cups loosely packed baby spinach

Melt coconut oil over medium heat in a saute pan.  Add onion and spices and saute for 3-5 minutes, or until onion is soft.  Add garlic, saute 1 minute more.  
Add spinach to pan.  Stir and cook for about 30 seconds, then cover the pan, remove from heat, and allow spinach to steam for about 3-4 minutes or until wilted.

Recipe Source: Inspired by the flavors in this recipe by Heidi at 101cookbooks.com

Eat Your Veggies: Roasted Delicata Squash

“Tomorrow, I’m going to eat more vegetables.”

"Eat Your Veggies" is a pseudo-weekly series featuring easy, seasonal veggie recipes.

I guess I’ve been going a little squash crazy lately, only because I have a ton of it leftover from my CSA.  And its just such a quintessential fall food: brilliantly orange, soft, warm, and pillowy.

Delicata Squash are awesome.  They’re small, so you can buy only the amount you need and not have awkward half-squashes wrapped in plastic and tupperware bins of puree hanging around your kitchen.   Peeling winter squash is the most dangerous and time consuming aspect of preparation, but Delicata skin is thin enough to digest, so no peeling required!  Hooray for not going to the ER with severed fingers!

Give roasting them a shot.  Its quick and easy, and makes a great side dish to any fall or winter meal.  I served it with mini meat loaves and green salad.

Roasted Delicata Squash (serves 3)

2 medium Delicata Squash
olive oil
salt
1 teaspoon dried rosemary
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon cider vinegar (or red wine vinegar, or white wine vinegar)
1 teaspoon brown sugar (or honey, stevia, agave nectar)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Cut the squash in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds and pulp with a spoon.  Slice crosswise into half inch crescents.
Toss with olive oil, salt to taste, and rosemary.  Place on a baking sheet and roast in 400F oven for 20-30 minutes, until very tender and easily pierced with a fork. Allow to cool for five minutes and place in a large bowl.

Toss squash with mustard, vinegar, sugar, and parsley.  Add salt to taste.

Recipe Source: Rachael’s brain, probably amalgamated from various squash recipes.
Delicata Squash Info Source (and more recipe ideas): “Healthy Delicata Squash Recipes.” EatingWell.

Eat Your Veggies: Southwestern Baked Potatoes

"Tomorrow, I'm going to eat more vegetables."

"Eat Your Veggies" is a pseudo-weekly series featuring easy, seasonal veggie recipes.  

This recipe was invented as the result of my attempts to create a seasonally appropriate Taco Salad recipe, one that did not rely on fresh lettuce and tomatoes as its backbone.  I ended up morphing it into a vaguely southwestern type of baked potato.  

Instead of lettuce, I used crunchy cabbage mixed with beans, seasoned with a paprika olive oil dressing.  I’ll admit that back in the day, I dismissed cabbage.  Before I started cooking with it I thought of it as bland and uninteresting.  Yet when cooked properly (as in not boiled into stringy oblivion) its actually really sweet and plays well with many genres of food. I thought it was a good choice for the somewhat mexican flavors in this dish.




Southwestern Baked Potatoes
Serves 4

4 medium russet potatoes
½ head green or napa cabbage, diced
2 cans black beans
½ cup cheddar cheese, grated
1 ripe avocado, sliced
olive oil

Dressing:
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon dried rosemary
½ teaspoon dried thyme
½ teaspoon dried oregano
2 teaspoons paprika
2 medium garlic cloves, finely chopped
pinch of red pepper flakes
¼ teaspoon sea salt flakes
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Prick potatoes all over with a fork.  Bake in a 400F degree oven until easily pierced with a fork (about 45min- 1 ½ hours, depending on the size of your potatoes)

Make dressing: gently heat olive oil over medium low heat until warm.  Add all other ingredients and let the flavors blend while you prepare the rest of the dish.

Saute cabbage in a few tablespoons olive oil over medium heat until just tender.  Add dressing and black beans.  Cook until heated through.  

Cut open baked potato and top with cabbage/bean mixture.  Garnish with cheese and avocado.

Source: Dressing adapted from 101cookbooks.com

Eat Your Veggies: Nutty Bacon-Broccoli Salad

We're good for you!

Eat Your Veggies is a pseudo-weekly series highlighting interesting ways of incorporating more vegetables into your diet.  There seems to be a wide swath of opinions on what a healthy diet is, but I think everybody can agree that veggies should be a big part of it! Plus unprocessed, plant based foods use less resources to produce and package than meat or things that come in boxes.  

I grew up with "salad" pretty much always meaning lettuce, green onions, and tomatoes, topped with ranch dressing.  And I'm not ashamed to admit thats pretty much always what I make now. But it grows tiresome, and those ingredients aren't always very good in the late fall and winter.  So, I turned to a broccoli salad to make a seasonally appropriate change to my side dish routine.  Broccoli is a great "starter" vegetable because it carries other flavors well without being too assertive.  Its also pleasantly crunchy, colorful, and keeps for a long time in the fridge.  

This dish consisted of broccoli and shallots, which were lightly sauteed in the drippings on one bacon slice.  The bacon added a slight meaty note to everything that I really enjoyed, but certainly isn't necessary if meat isn't your bag.  The dressing was creamy, garlicky, nutty, and sweet.  

Nutty, creamy, and full of shadows.

There was a lot going on in this dish.  While it was supposed to be a side dish, its complexity of flavor and texture easily eclipsed the lackluster butternut squash casserole that I served it with.  It pretty much saved the meal, and even caused my mom to reevaluate her negative opinion of peanut butter as a component of non-sandwich foods!

So maybe you don't like veggies.  But if you like peanut sauce, bacon or garlic, give this salad a try.  It could change everything!

Nutty Bacon-Broccoli Salad

2 large heads broccoli, cut into florets (3-4 cups)
1 largish shallot, sliced
1 bacon slice
Dressing: ¼ cup creamy peanut butter

2 cloves garlic

3 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon honey

about 2 tablespoons warm water

1 apple (I used Golden Delicious, but any kind you enjoy eating raw is fine), sliced
Handful of slivered, toasted almonds

Fry the bacon slice over medium high heat until extra crispy.  Remove, let cool and crumble.

Add the shallot to the pan with the bacon grease and saute until it starts to get soft.  Add broccoli and stir fry until broccoli is warm and just beginning to get tender.  (It is better to err on the side of undercooked)

Meanwhile, combine peanut butter, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and honey in a small food processor (or blender, or you could just mince the garlic and whisk the ingredients together).  Process until smooth.  Add warm water as necessary to achieve a creamy yet spreadable consistency.  

Transfer hot broccoli to a large serving bowl and toss with dressing.  Top with apple slices, almonds, and crumbled bacon.  

Notes:
This is vegan if you leave out the bacon. Stir fry the veggies in olive oil instead.
This is stricter vegan if you replace the honey with agave nectar.
(adapted from 101Cookbooks)