Garlicky mushrooms and spinach on toast with a soft-boiled egg

Woke up with this on my mind on Sunday morning. I'd found some really good dark Nordic bread on an exploratory excursion to Amager on Saturday, and with my current splurge on anything with eggs or dairy, well fancied a good eggs-on-toast breakfast. I guess over the years I've refined and identified my favourite parts of an English breakfast. I like toast. Garlicky fried or baked mushrooms. Intense, irony spinach. Eggs, scrambled in butter or poached so you get saucy runny yolk. I had a good eggs florentine in Putney the other week (I kind of feel like the Hollandaise is unnecessary when you have runny yolk though... although I guess nice enough if someone else is making it).

Was debating whether to poach or soft boil; went with soft boiling; and I think it was a successful experiment. I liked that you could cook more than one at once and they were ready at the same time. And it's less faff. There is peeling to contend with, but it didn't take long just for two, and they were super cute sitting in their nests of spinach atop slices of toast.

olive oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
10 mushrooms, cleaned and roughly chopped
salt+pepper
knob of butter
2 eggs
4 slices of good dark toast
400g spinach, washed
nutmeg, freshly grated

Heat some olive oil in a lidded frying pan (meanwhile boil water for eggs in a small saucepan) and add half the garlic. Fry until starting to colour, then add the mushrooms, season, and cook until they have released their juice and reabsorbed it. Finish with a knob of butter, then transfer to a plate.

Probably about time to put the eggs and toast on - cook eggs in boiling salted water for 4 min. Add a little more oil and the rest of the garlic to the frying pan and fry a little before adding the spinach and cooking until wilted and any excessive liquid has evaporated. Season with salt, pepper and freshly grated nutmeg.

Put toast on plates, put mushrooms on top, then mound of spinach, make a depression in the middle of spinach mound. Peel eggs and place one in the middle of each nest. Sprinkle a little salt+pepper on top. Eat straight away. Yolk will spill out and make sauce when you cut into the egg - yum.


Yesssss. Would be good for Easter breakfast.

Miso, membrillo and toasted sesame seeds

I cut the membrillo into pieces last night - half for me, half for L; a bit extra for her to give back to M... Then half of our bit into pieces to store in the freezer for future use and the other half to eat right away / to keep in the fridge. I think it should keep quite a long time in the fridge, but just in case that doesn't work out the frozen stuff is back-up. We managed to make quite a big dent in it last night alone - S is a big fan. He was eating it on lightly toasted bread slices with manchego. I decided that the membrillo was amazing on the aforementioned toasted bread, over a smear of white miso and below a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds - sweetness, tang, crunch, saltiness and toastiness.

S's Abendbrot: tomato toasts

Apparently, in Germany the evening meal (Abendbrot) is most often just bread, with cheese / meat / whatever (Abend = evening, Brot = bread). So S likes when we just have bread and whatever for dinner. It's not such a bad idea: it's quick and a good way to use up stuff. And adaptable. The other night I made a couple of dips (red lentil dip and baba ghanoush) and roasted some veg, so the rest of the week we've been eating dips with carrot sticks and toast, avocado on toast, and these - S's current fave - tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil, salt+pepper on toast. I'm guessing this is not exactly what most Germans eat for Abendbrot, but take a German vegetarian out of the fatherland for 10 years and look what happens. They are more like bruschetta. Really quick and really tasty, especially with our current crop of garden tomatoes (S says they are the best tomatoes he's ever had: praise indeed as he does love tomatoes), plus basil also from the pot garden and juicy CSA garlic.

4 thickish slices robust bread (he favours TJ's rustic sourdough)
1 garlic clove, peeled
1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
~4 medium-sized ripe tomatoes, chopped or sliced
small bunch of basil, washed and torn into pieces
fresh ground sea salt and black pepper

Toast the bread. Rub it with garlic. Drizzle with olive oil. Arrange tomatoes over it. Sprinkle with torn basil leaves and finish with a good grinding of salt and pepper. Cut into smaller pieces if you like, and eat straight away.

Morels!

Morels (Morchella esculenta)

Morels were starting to seem like a mythical beast. I had heard tell of their wondrous beauty and tastiness, but had spoken to no one who had actually seen them in New England: even the author of our mushroom book writes that he has never found them round here.

With no idea where to look, it seemed like there was slim chance of finding any. The book suggested old apple orchards, so last weekend we hiked up to an old orchard in Concord, NH to look for morels. We found soooooo many dog ticks (or rather they found us), and thus failed to really do much of a hunt, let alone score any shrooms.

This weekend we were not even thinking of looking for morels. We'd had an epic weekend adventure, with lady's slipper orchids and snakes and a surfer on a standing wave and dinosaur footprints and alpacas and so so much. Seb and I just took a little walk at the place we were hanging out by a lake with our friends' family, and all of a sudden we spotted morels! Big, beautiful, yellow-light brown ones: about 6 inches tall. The first few we saw were a little decrepit, but we found a couple more in good condition.

I was excited to get them home! The three morels were not much, just enough for a snack. I decided just to saute them with a tiny bit of garlic, some parsley and mirin, and eat them on little toasts.

(serves two, as snack or starter sized portions)

1 tbsp olive oil (plus a little more for drizzling)
3 morels, carefully washed, cleaned and chopped
1/4 of a small clove of garlic, finely chopped (optional)
1/4 tbsp curly parsley, chopped (plus a pinch more to finish)
1/2 tsp mirin
1/2 tsp fake butter
salt+pepper
2 slices of baguette

Make sure the morels are well cleaned: I washed them under the tap and then patted them dry with paper towels, then chopped off any substandard looking bits and checked them carefully / removed any dirt.

Heat the oil in a frying pan. Add garlic (make sure to use just a smidge: the morel taste is quite subtle), and fry for a minute or so, until just starting to brown. Add the chopped morels and fry for a few minutes more, until they have released their juices and reabsorbed them. Meanwhile, heat a dry frying pan and toast the baguette slices, a couple of minutes on each side, until crisp and slightly browned. When the morels start to look lightly browned around the edges add the mirin and fake butter and fry for a minute more. Finally, add the parsley and salt and pepper to taste. To serve, drizzle the toasts with a little olive oil, spoon the mushrooms over and sprinkle with a little more chopped parsley.


Gentle washing seemed to be fine: these guys are not very porous and were quite tricky to clean so the washing helped. This was a tasty little plate, although I wondered if the garlic, small amount though it was, might have been too much: the morel taste was quite subtle. They had a good, firm texture, and tasted slightly sweet and gently mushroomy. They were good. Wish we had more now, my how greedy I am.