Easy Breakfast

I found this recipe the other day buried in unread blog posts from my Google Reader archives. I tried it this morning using baby spinach and it was delicious. It took less than 5 minutes to make and seemed like a healthy start to my day. Rustic, simple…my kind of meal.

My personal Breakfast of Champions is a fried egg on a handful of raw greens–say, arugula, dandelion, baby spinach, watercress, or even mesclun–lightly dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a few drops of sherry vinegar, salt and pepper, maybe some snipped chives. It is a play on a classic rustic Italian dish: steamed asparagus with a fried egg and some grated Parmigiano. The operating principle is that when you break the soft-cooked yolk, it spills onto the vegetable like a sauce; vegetable and protein marry, with little fuss, in a single delicious dish.

I’ve been trying to find a lot more recipes like this lately. Basic tastes and fool-proof cooking methods. That’s often where the Europeans edge out Americans in my opinion, though by no means do I think they have us beat in cuisine. It’s just different.