Eggs with Veggies, Avocado, Italian Sautéed Kale, and Strawberries

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Improvisation № I: Eggs can pair with a variety of vegetables, cheeses, and other ingredients you may have in your cupboard or fridge. Today’s improvisation didn’t start with eggs. It led to eggs. It started with kale. The kale started with a shopping trip.

Tonight, I decided to cook kale. Why do I have it around? I don’t know. Let’s get past that, though, and talk about what I decided to do with it. Well, first of all, it’s delicious. Two, good for you. Three, it’s a convenient side, because once it’s in the pan, you have nothing to do but let it simmer for 30 minutes, which is plenty of time to cook up a main dish to go with it. A perfect time for Griddler chicken, but I had none on-hand. I did have slew of other stuff.

Dinner in about 40 minutes. I won’t lie and say 30. It’s 40.

Makes 2 servings

First, find a simple recipe for kale at Martha Stewart.

Italian Sautéed Kale: 4 servings (but see note, below)

1. I recommend you follow Martha’s dictates pretty much as-written. Otherwise, she’ll hunt you down. I swear to you, she can and she will! “It is quite good,” I’m saying out loud, because I suspect she’s bugging my kitchen. Anyway, the recipe mentions that kale has a magical way of taking on flavors. No kidding! Go very lightly on the salt. NOTE: The recipe says four servings, but since this improv meal is pretty light, I suggest you simply divide the kale it in half and make two servings out of it.

You should eat kale. Gwyneth Paltrow eats it, and look at her. She’s married to Coldplay. So, all I’m saying is, if you ate kale, maybe you could be married to a rock star or a super-hot actress (for a while).

Avocado: 2 servings

2. Once the kale is cooking, cut the avocado into slices. Net search “how to prep an avocado” if you don’t know how. Set them aside.

Strawberries and Cream: 2 servings

3. Cut the leaves off and slice the berries in half. Plate them and sprinkle them with sugar. Grab a cereal bowl and put it in the freezer, along with a wire whisk.

Too Lazy to Omelet: 2 servings

4. After the strawberries, move on to the eggs. Fish around for some veggies and cheese. Look for veggies that cook quickly. Eyeball the measurements. Mine turned out to be something like this:

5. Melt the butter in a medium-sized sauté pan over medium-high heat. Swirl the pan around so the whole bottom is well coated. Crack the eggs into it. Lower the heat to its lowest setting. Salt and pepper the eggs. Cover. Once the eggs are just set, add the veggies and put the cover back on. Cook until eggs are nearly done to your liking. Off heat, add cheese and cover until melted.

6. While the cheese is melting, whip the cream for the strawberries. With such a small amount, it’s so easy to do this by hand – but a lot of people don’t know that. So, by now, everyone in the house is probably smelling your wonderful cooking and they’re probably starting to wander into the kitchen. Act like you don’t notice, and whip that cream’s ass into fluffy perfection, with that bowl and whisk from the freezer. Once it’s nearly where you want it, added a big, fat pinch of powdered sugar and whisk that in. Mounded this atop your berries. Then be like, what? You never saw somebody whip cream before?

Bringing It to the Table:

7. Use a rubber spatula to bisect the pan of eggs. Tip the pan and slide one portion onto a dinner plate; assist with the spatula. Slide the other portion onto a second plate. Divide the kale between the plates. Distribute the avocado. Voila.

Your kale will probably be done before you’ve finished this other stuff. OK. Turn off the heat and leave the cover on. It’ll stay warm.

Serve the eggs on warm plates. Run them under hot water or nuke’m.

What this Dish Brings to the Table

It’s meatless, it’s packed with vegetables, and it features superfoods. The avocado is unadulterated. Eggs are nutritious. Yes, there is saturated fat in the yolk. You could make this dish using only whites. Sure, I fried them in butter. You could use a mixture of olive oil and butter, or just oil. In a nonstick pan, you could cook the eggs with a minuscule amount of fat, or no fat at all. You could steam the kale.

Where Would You Go with this Improv?

Swiss Spinach Eggs:

Sometimes, improvisations like this lead to combinations that I want to recreate. One of my favorites is to use fresh spinach as the only vegetable, and Swiss cheese instead of Parmesan. It produces something like an everyday-version of Eggs Florentine. If I buy fresh spinach for a recipe that I’m following, but the recipe doesn’t use up all the spinach, I often turn to this little number the following day, to use up the rest of the spinach. It’s fantastic for a Saturday morning breakfast. If I wanted to elevate Swiss Spinach Eggs into something more ambitious, I might compress the cooking time so that the cheese melted while the eggs yolks were still runny, make a Dijon Mustard White Sauce (beforehand, obviously), and build this into something along the lines of an Eggs Benedict … Swiss Eggs Benedictine, maybe.

Suggestions for further reading:

• Improvisation № II: Eggs for Breakfast
• Improvisation № III: Hot Chocolate
• Improvisation № IV: Trifle Improv
• Improvisation № V: Improv Soup