Easy Eggs Florentine

In my low-carb, high-fat reincarnation, I find myself cooking more and trying new dishes. No longer can I slap ham and cheese between whole-wheat bread, garnish with potato chips, and call it lunch. A bit of creativity is in order.

But only a bit. I am a simple man. My method as both a cook and a writer is the same: I simplify.  As a writer, I compose a sentence, and then go over it to remove words. I’m hell on adjectives and adverbs. Call it the “blue pencil” approach (or maybe the “Twitter Technique”). I take the same blue pencil to recipes.

An example is this recipe for Easy Eggs Florentine. I’ve got it down to three ingredients, one of which – water – hardly counts. In the photo, you see the result of my first time cooking eggs over spinach.  It worked well. I’ve tried it several times since, always with good results. But I have been a big fan of spinach, even the canned product, ever since my childhood days watching Popeye cartoons on a black-and-white TV.

Ingredients

1 cup frozen spinach (Confession: I have sometimes used canned spinach, without additional water necessary.)
3 eggs
water

Preparation

Spread the spinach out in an 8-inch skillet.

Add just enough water to cover the spinach. Bring to a boil. Let it cook about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs in a bowl. When most, but not all, the water has boiled away, pour the eggs over the top of the spinach.  Turn down the heat.  Cover the pan and let it cook for another five minutes, until the eggs are set.

That’s it.  I added a halved strawberry as garnish, as pictured. (Melting a pat of butter on top of the eggs would help with the fat content.)

The Eggs Florentine recipe has about 260 calories, 4 grams of net carbs (total carbs minus fiber), and 20 grams of protein.  The strawberry adds about 4 calories and another gram of net carbs. If you need more calories, add another egg or perhaps shredded cheese.

This was a light lunch by my standards, and somewhat complex.  A half-pound t-bone steak, grilled or broiled, with a side of buttered green beans also works well.