Bitter Greens, Eggs, and Cheese

Here is my idea of a perfect breakfast: sautéed mustard greens with bacon, a poached egg, and a nice dusting of Parmigiano. This combination is like Feng Shui for Sunday morning. You’ve got your bitter, your salty, your sweet; and texture-wise, you’ve got crispy meets soft meets damp-leafy.

C’est harmony.

Dandelion greens or chard also work in this recipe. Don’t be afraid to add a few red pepper flakes if you want to create some heat. Word has it that bitter greens are good for you during a change of seasons. They tonify the liver, so says my Chinese herbalist. I find them very cleansing the morning after, oh, a Manhattan and an enormous cheese plate.

Mustard Greens w/ Poached Egg & Parm

1 bunch leafy greens (about 3 packed cups, chopped)

4 strips bacon

1 Tbsp. vinegar (Balsamic works well)

1 small purple onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 egg

Grated Parm or Grana Padano

Fry up the bacon, and reserve a teaspoon or two of bacon grease in your skillet for sautéing. On medium heat, soften the onion and garlic in the bacon grease. When the onions are translucent, add the chopped greens. While the greens cook, simmer a saucepan of water and crack your egg into a cereal bowl. Add a teaspoon of any old vinegar to the hot water – this will prevent the egg whites from fanning out into an octopus. Gently slide the raw egg into the hot water and let simmer 3 minutes or less.

When the greens are good and wilted, sprinkle them with a Tablespoon of good vinegar, add some crumbled bacon, and give them a final stir. Then arrange them on a plate, top them with your poached egg, and add a few cranks of pepper and as much grated Parm as you can handle. The sweetness of this cheese goes perfectly with the other flavors.

Save Your Parmesan Rinds (For Soup)

Today was soup weather, but I didn’t have much in the fridge, except fresh vegetables from our CSA share. No soup bones. No stock. Then I remembered reading a comment on Chowhound about tossing Parmesan rinds into a soup pot. Supposedly, the rind added flavor, similar to a ham hock. Okay, I had rinds. Oh, did I have cheese rinds.

So, in one went, along with water, bouillon, and lots of chopped celery and onion. I was making soup. It was time, friends, to put some of that leftover cheese to use.

I did a lot of Internet surfing while the cauldron bubbled. Would the rind melt? Would it crumble into a lot of unappealing bits? Every half hour or so, I swirled the wooden spoon around in my soup-to-be and saw a crusty half-moon of Parmigiano Reggiano surface. The rind stayed in tact, but it grew rubbery and amber-colored. It looked like a hunk of pork fat.

Then, I tasted. Ohhh…this experiment was coming together. The stock had layers of flavor. Beneath the soft, sweet onions and celery, there was another taste: a salty note. A rich, buttery accent. Could this be the secret to great vegetarian soups? I wondered.

How simple. How fantastic. Now I will always save my Parmesan rinds. And I will probably save the rind of any hard cheese, as long as it’s not coated in wax. Some people recommend storing these old rinds in the freezer so they don’t mold – not a bad idea, although dry cheeses don’t mold very fast, as long as you wrap them in wax paper and refrigerate them in a plastic bag.

Before serving my soup, I dug out the rind. I tasted it to see if would be good to cube and add as a garnish, but many hours of cooking had rendered it flavorless. All the taste was in the soup I’d tossed together – white bean and escarole, alas. And to think, when I looked in the fridge this morning I thought for sure I didn’t have any ingredients to make soup.

Grana Padano: A Pesto-Perfect Cheese

Last weekend, I decided it was time to bushwack the basil growing on my patio and make pesto for the neighbors. I had everything I needed – garlic, pine nuts, good olive oil – but no cheese, except for an expensive sliver of Parmigiano Reggiano that I keep in the back of the fridge to drizzle with truffle honey when I need a mood-changer. For making pesto, I didn’t want spend $30/lb, so I turned to Grana Padano, which costs a third of the price and still tastes like joy itself.

Grana Padano looks a lot like Parm. It’s dry and crumbly with a fruity smell and golden color. What’s the difference? To read on, please click here.


Full disclosure: This post is part of a series I'm writing for Di Bruno Bros., one of my fave cheese haunts in Philly. The deal is, I get paid to guest-blog on the store's site (dibruno.blogspot.com) on Wednesdays. Woo hoo!