Spring Dinner: Spaghetti with Fried Egg, Garlic, and Herbs

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By Lisa

It has been no secret that my house has been upended by the release of my new book. It’s all been good–lots of fun and excitement. But there are a million little parts to promoting and marketing that fill my head and my days with noise, and I’m just exhausted at the end of the day.   We have been eating, and I have been cooking, if with less creativity than usual. I’ll be blogging in the coming weeks about what I stocked and the standard dishes I used this time around in order to keep food on the table. But we’ve also eaten out a lot more than we ever have before, because one of the things that’s been driven home during this period of professional intensity is that the cooking is not always the problem: the cleaning up.  With all the moving parts in my workday, on some nights (ok, very many nights), I just don’t want to face the chaos of the dirty pots or pans or even dishes.

To give you a sense of just how upended our my routine has been, Yesterday was the first time I made it to the farmers market in 3 weeks. Which is longer than I have gone without a visit in 10 years.

Which is why it was especially nice to sit down to dinner altogther last night. We had a tablecloth, and artichokes, and fresh salad, and tulips, and a bottle of wine, and good bread and this pasta dish, which is fast and satisfying and endlessly adaptable.

Spaghetti with Fried Egg. Garlic, and Herbs

Serves 4

  • 4 eggs
  • 4 cloves garlic (or to taste), finely chopped
  • 1 tsp dried herb (whatever you like & have on hand: oregano, thyme, marjoram…)
  • red chili pepper flakes (optional, to taste)
  • 1-3 T butter
  • olive oil for frying
  • 3/4 pound pasta
  • grated cheese for serving
  1. Bring a large pot of water  to boil.  Cook pasta according to package directions.
  2. In a large frying pan, melt butter with a good amount of olive oil, about 1/4-1/3 cup, depending on amount of butter you use. It’s okay to omit butter and just use oil.
  3. Add garlic & chili pepper and sautee for 1-2 minutes
  4. Gently add eggs, one at a time, to oil and garlic mixture.
  5. Sprinkle each egg with salt and herbs.
  6. Fry, sunny side up, spooning oil/garlic over egges until whites are set but yolks are still runny.
  7. Divide pasta into 4 bowls.
  8. Top each portion of pasta with one egg and a few spoons of garlic oil.
  9. Serve with grated cheese. The yolk, when broken will form a sauce to coat the pasta.

The Last Supper

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by Caroline

Every year at my sons’ school, parents organize a night of Random Dinners for each class. Some families volunteer to host, and can dictate a style of cuisine or theme for the evening. About a week in advance, other parents are randomly assigned to provide a dish or course and then are given an address the morning of the dinner. We’re about to participate in our fourth random dinner with Ben’s third grade class, and our first with the kindergarten group, and I’m looking forward to them. We’ve always had fun, always wound up talking to folks we don’t see in our regular drop-off/pick-up routine, always discovered new things about our fellow parents. It has always been a terrific meal.

This year, I’m helping organize the kindergarten random dinners so I have an advance peek at what some of the families are planning. There will be several Mexican dinners, one barbecue, one couple doing sushi, another serving Greek food. One couple decided to focus on the theme rather than a style of food and has asked everyone to bring something they’d want to eat on their last day. They were inspired by Melanie Dunea’s book about chefs and their final meals (see some of the photographs here) and even though I’m not necessarily attending that meal, it’s got me thinking: what would I want my final flavors to be? Lemon cake? Puttanesca? My mom’s apple crisp? What would you want to eat on your last day?

Rainy Day Lentil Soup

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by Caroline

I was locked in a terrible head cold all last week, leaving the house only when I had to, mostly lying in bed drinking gallons of tea. I didn’t have the energy to cook, so I was so happy when I remembered one smart thing I had done with the CSA produce last year: steal a friend’s idea to make mirepoix and stick it in the freezer.

Now a proper mirepoix (also known as refogado in Portuguese, soffritto in Italian, or sofrito in Spanish) is an evenly-diced combination of onion, celery and carrots. But my knife skills are not all that, and I knew no one was going to be examining my dice. I did the chopping in the food processor, and then scooped half-cup portions of each vegetable into quart-sized freezer bags. I have been using them to start soups all winter long. This is my last one, a little fuzzy with ice but still perfectly good and tasty:

It only took about 30 minutes, and minimal effort from me, to go from that to this:

Lentil soup with a poached egg on top, for extra comfort.

Soup recipes are so flexible and such a matter of personal taste, I hardly want to give a recipe, but here’s a general road map for a meatless version:

Drizzle a couple tablespoons of olive oil into the bottom of your soup pot and warm over medium heat. Add:

1/2 cup each diced onion, celery and carrot
or, 1 small onion, 2 stalks of celery and 2 carrots, diced
1 or 2 cloves of minced garlic

Saute until the vegetables are tender and just starting to color. Deglaze the pot with a splash of wine (red or white, whichever you prefer). If you happen to have some tomato paste, a couple tablespoons are a nice addition here. Now add

1 c lentils, rinsed and picked over
4 c water or vegetable stock

Bring to a simmer and then simmer, covered, until the lentils are tender, about 30 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Bakesale for Japan

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by Caroline

I was born in Tokyo, as was my mother; a college housemate lives there now, writing for Reuters, as do my cousins, who work (currently non-stop) for the American Embassy. There are writers I care about who live in Japan, like Literary Mama’s co-editor for fiction, Suzanne Kamata, and one of the contributors to this anthology, Wendy Nakanishi. Luckily, no one I know has been hurt by the quake and tsunami, but of course tens of thousands of people have — I can’t bring myself to look up the latest numbers, they are so devastating.

And so while I hardly need an excuse to participate in a bakesale, when I read about Samin Nosrat’s Bakesale for Japan, I particularly wanted to help.

Last year, the Bay Area chef organized a Bakesale for Haiti that raised $23,000 for earthquake relief. This year, she’s hoping to double or triple that amount at the April 2nd Bakesale for Japan. My sons’ school is doing their bakesale March 31st, as part of its annual César Chavez Day of Service — a juxtaposition I just love. Whether you want to organize a bakesale yourself, or just shop at one, do consider participating somehow in this very sweet fundraiser for Japan. Click here for more information.

Bison Jerky

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by Caroline

(click on the image to enlarge)

Yes, it’s true: the vegetarian food blogger is offering you a recipe for bison jerky, courtesy of her even-more-stringently vegetarian nine year-old son.

I am trapped in a head cold that makes me uninterested in much besides tea and toast.

My son, however, is embarked on a multi-week westward migration game in his third grade classroom. The kids have divided into families, been assigned jobs, built covered wagons, bought supplies, and, just this week, started heading to California from Missouri. This week’s homework has involved some research projects: cholera; snake bite remedies; and, tonight, jerky. My husband tried to suggest that Ben, who has frustrated his classroom family a little bit by refusing to imaginary-hunt or eat meat on the journey, come up with a recipe for tofu jerky, but he demurred. He was interested to hear that his late grandfather had once built a backyard smoker, and of course a herd of bison grazes in Golden Gate Park, just a few blocks from our house, but thankfully those bison and that smoker have never met. He wasn’t interested in the recipe I found in my copy of Sarah Hale’s The Good Housekeeper (first published in 1841). She doesn’t offer jerky, exactly, but has a variety of recipes for smoked, pickled, and salted meats, and even one for a meat preserved in snow: “the meat remains as fresh and juicy when it is taken out to be cooked, as when it was first killed.” Mmm. Instead, he adapted a recipe from our current bedtime book, Little House in the Big Woods. Let me know if you try it!

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