Assembling the Ideal Breakfast
April 26th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Posted in breakfast, garden
Start with fresh salad greens
This is how I’m making breakfast lately. Start with a big plateful of fresh salad greens. The salad greens I planted in the garden this spring are not quite ready, so I buy a big bag of greens at the farmers market on Sunday morning. It lasts us through the week. Then I take the plate into the garden with a pair of scissors and add some the greens we do have: red mustard, mizuna, arugula. I like a zesty salad.
Dress the greens with extra-virgin olive oil and your favorite vinegar, a pinch of coarse salt, freshly ground black pepper.
Beef tongue brined, then boiled
Add two generous slices of cooked beef tongue. We get ours at a very reasonable price from our local dairy, South Mountain Creamery. I brine the tongue for a week before cooking it with aromatics. Then I have a weeks’ worth of tongue (nobody else in the family will touch it–their loss).
Buy pastured eggs for health
Finally, top everything off with two fried eggs. We buy pastured eggs from a West Virginia farmer at the farmers market. Pastured eggs have more healthful beta carotene and omega-3 fatty acids. You can tell from the deep orange color of the yolks. I love the way the salad greens and beef tongue sop up the yolk. I don’t think you can make a better breakfast than this.
Ugh! Beef tongue! Yuk!
My favorite these days is sauteed greens from my garden (the hoop house is the key), either topped with a fried egg from the backyard chickens, or encased in 2 beaten eggs, then turned out onto a tortilla, rolled up, and eaten with soy sauce and sesame oil (a version of a street food breakfast I used to get in Taiwan in the 1980s). As long as there are greens and eggs, I’m a happy girl.
Yeah, beef tongue sounds like a delicacy. No wonder the eggs look so good . . . they’re from good ole WV!