Breakfast quickie: Hit-the-road Ham and Cheese Spinach Toast
Drink with: Rwanda, French Press
Download the pdf here.
If you’re someone who loves breakfast but hates brunch, this is the recipe for you. With all the layered components of a poor man’s Eggs Benedict (less the fancy time consuming hollandaise sauce), you can use the toast like a plate, transferring the entire sandwich to a napkin and eating it on the go. You’re welcome.
Ingredients
Slice of toasted bread
Olive oil
2 slices ham, diced
Big handful of baby spinach
2 slices Swiss cheese, diced
Salt, ground black pepper and a little chile powder or piment d’espelette (a ground pepper produced around the town of Espelette in Southern France)
Method
In a big sauté pan, heat about 1 tablespoon of olive oil until just before it smokes. Add the ham and fry it up a bit, just until lightly brown. Add the spinach and cook while stirring with a wooden spatula to wilt the greens. (Don’t pick up the pan to toss the spinach. Keep it directly on the heat so the water coming out of the spinach will evaporate instead of collecting in the pan and stewing the greens.) Add the cheese into the spinach along with a good pinch of salt and some fresh cracked pepper. Turn off the heat under that pan while you fry up the egg in a small skillet, which I usually do in a good amount of olive oil to get nice crispy edges.
Season the eggs with salt, pepper and chile powder or piment d’espelette, pan and basting the yolk with a little of the hot olive oil to cook to your liking (this is where the extra oil comes in handy too).
By this time some liquid will have collected in the spinach pan. So push the spinach one side of the pan with the back of your wooden spoon. Hold it in place and pressing lightly, tip out the extra water so your toast doesn’t get soggy.
To layer:
Bottom: Toast
Middle: Spinach, cheese and ham mixture
Top: Fried egg
