Eggs or...

Ordinary is Delicious

Look carefully at this picture. It's not my amateur photography.  This is a tomato that has seen better days.  But if you have been tossing out a tomato (or 3! God forbid) because it's no longer salad material, well then you are my target audience for today.  When it comes to sauce, compotes, stews, soups or cooked tomatoes of almost any kind a little age is nothing to be ashamed of.  Even in L.A.

This is not a story about heading out to the farmers market and dropping half a C-note on fruits and veggies at their peak. Although that is a good story.  This is about what to do with your beautiful, EXPENSIVE, farmers market haul, when you have failed to use it in a timely fashion.  Should you throw it away? Well, if it's the gorgeous lemon basil I picked up on a Monday and foolishly washed so that it could no longer be recognized by sight or smell two days later, then yes, shed one tear and toss it out. (Note: don't wash herbs before you stick 'em in the fridge)

But not tomatoes.  When tomatoes dry out a little, that is actually a fine thing for cooking as you are usually trying to cook the water out of them anyway.  In Los Angeles, which is a desert, tomatoes left in a nice bowl on the counter continue to ripen (as long as you haven't refrigerated them) and sweeten (a little) before they go the way of compost .

So anyway, enough about tomatoes. Let's talk about eggs. With stuff.  I like my eggs with stuff. Not sweet stuff. Not pancakes, waffles, or ugh...fruit. I like savory stuff. And the stuff is generally whatever the hell I can cobble together.  It's lovely if you happen to have bacon, shitakes and chives.  But whatever you have, zucchini, onions, one mushroom, one piece of cheese, left over caponata, bok choy, asparagus, a half a salami sandwich!  You can make spectacular creations to snuggle up to you fluffy golden eggs.

Today's creation was born from two formerly beautiful organic roma tomatoes, about one ounce of ham, a handful of parsley and a clove of garlic.  Nothing jumping out of the fridge screaming, "make me!"

But boy was it good.  Now eggs. If you think simple things don't deserve your careful attention, I'm going to beg to disagree.  I can cook an awful lot of fancy things (I went to school for it!), but one of the most important  skills I learned there was the right way to make eggs. A terrific youtube video of Julia Child making the most basic simple plain omlette in the swirled French way, has helped me immensely too.

So here's my two cents on cooking eggs.  Scrambled eggs, whether cooked in butter, olive oil or some other tasty fat (strain and save bacon fat in a jar in the fridge if you want to throw caution to the wind), should be cooked slowly, over a low flame and agitated gently. If you stir them often you get a small curd that is silky and soft.  If you stir them less you get big fluffy curds.  You can add a splash of milk, cream, creme fraiche, buttermilk, or just water to the raw eggs.  But try to avoid ice cubes.

  Whoops!

Put it all together and you have a very savory breakfast without resorting to bacon or sausage (i know, this has ham in it! but not a lot!) Delicious foil for your eggs, and nice way to use up everything in your kitchen. Viola.