Last Night's Dinner 21

Dadi's Eggs Revisited: Gently spiced creamed spinach and other vegetables with cheese and eggs

I am starting this post with a promise of recipes to come, because yesterday my favourite delivery of the year happened - organic mandarins from Crowdfarming and specifically from this farm in Sicily. I’ve been getting these for a few years now and they are wonderful - highly perfumed, floral zest, slightly sharp juice. They are proper, they have not had their subtlety bred out of them in favour of sweetness, like most clementines. I use them for all kinds of things, but especially this jam. You will find a recipe for mandarin jam bread and butter pudding there too. I am going to be making jam this weekend, as well as candying some of the peel. And I bought scotch bonnets today and shall also be making a big batch of mandarin and scotch bonnet -kosho. There may also be a mandarin sephardic cake to take with me to my demo/talk in Shaftesbury next week. My kitchen is going to smell WONDERFUL.

I mention the mandarins here just in case anyone wants to buy them - this year’s harvest is still available, see the above link, and if 6kg is a lot, you can always divvy them up. I make extra jam for favourite people.

Onto today’s recipe:

Shariq rarely requests specific meals for dinner. He might occasionally say “we haven’t had chicken livers for a while” (his favourite), or similar, but otherwise he is very easy going. We have a long standing joke that when I cook something he likes and he always says, “I love this, can we have it every week?” knowing full well that as a food writer, there is always something else I need to be cooking. Of course we have hits which become immediate family favourites and so get absorbed into the repertoire, but the cycle is more likely monthly than weekly, and there are a lot of variations on a theme. Meals are very rarely the same twice.

So last night, very unusually, he asked me if we could have spinach and eggs for dinner. This is a very specific dish, a version of which appears in Modern Pressure Cooking and which I wrote about last year. In fact, it is almost exactly a year ago, which is, I think, why Shariq asked for it. This dish is his idea of comfort, made for him when he was growing up by his mother, who passed away last February. His mother had been on his mind, but it hadn’t registered with him that we were approaching the one year anniversary - his subconscious was clearly telling him something because this was the meal he was craving.

I did tweak it, of course I did. It is one of those dishes which can be adapted depending on what you have and it is quite storecupboard/freezer. I didn’t have any cream, but I did have cream cheese and that worked just as well, if not better. I’ve also used Boursin in the past too. I also asked Shariq every step of the way whether the additional vegetables etc. were acceptable, and they were, especially the mushrooms which he loves and he was very happy with the end result - not only that, Lilly said it was her favourite of all the versions I have done (bonkers as she doesn’t really like mushrooms!), which is the really the reason I am writing it up again here.

A quick recap on eggs. You can steam them in the pressure cooker, either in the base, usually on a piece of fabric to stop them rattling around, or on a trivet. Either way, you will find that even if they are very fresh (which makes them notoriously harder to peel), the shells will break off cleanly - often in just a couple of pieces. I assume it is all to do with pressure being pushed between egg white and membrane.

Eggs with Creamed Vegetables and Cheese

4-8 eggs, depending on appetite

1 tbsp olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 large carrot, coarsely grated

200g mushrooms (any sort), sliced

10g ginger, grated

4 garlic cloves, grated or crushed

1 tbsp curry powder (any you like)

A few cumin/nigella/mustard seeds, as you like

A small bunch of coriander, stems and leaves separated, finely chopped

750g frozen whole leaf spinach

200g frozen peas

100g cream cheese

A rasp of nutmeg

150g hard cheese, eg. mature cheddar, grated

A few green chillies, sliced (optional)