Baked Cheesy Eggs in Avocados, Say What?!

Hey Blogosphere,

So how about being totally badass and baking an egg, in an avocado, topping it with cheese, and serving it with breakfast potatoes? Let’s do this!

Ingredients:

• 1 medium or large avocado
• 2 small eggs
• shredded sharp cheddar cheese
• sea salt, to taste
• fresh cracked black pepper, to taste

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Crack the eggs in a medium bowl, careful to not puncture the yolks. Set aside.
3. Cut avocado in half and carefully remove seed. Depending on how big the seed is, the hole in the avocado should be big enough for one small egg. But if the hole looks too small, scoop out a little at a time till it matches the amount of egg.
4. In a medium baking dish, try to rest the avocado half inside the edge of the dish so that the avocado doesn’t tilt over. You need to keep the avocado from tilting so that the raw egg does not spill out. NOTE: I ended up using my egg poaching tray and then putting that inside a pie tin. See photo: 
5. You can crack the egg directly in the avocado, but it might overflow and make a mess. So this technique will be useful: With a medium spoon, gently scoop out one of the yolks and place it into the hole of the avocado. Then continue spooning the egg whites into the avocado hole till it’s full. Repeat for both avocado halves.
6. Add salt and fresh cracked black pepper on top of the eggs, to taste. Sprinkle the shredded cheese atop the eggs.
7. Gently place the baking dish in oven and bake for about 15 minutes. Baking time will vary depending on how much egg you have and how big your avocado is. So keep checking the egg to see if it’s cooked to your desired consistency.
8. Serve up with your favorite breakfast potato medley!

ENJOY!

Squash Blossoms Grilled Cheese

Hey Everyone!

FIRST FOOD POST ALERT!

Not going to even be humble, these were BOMB. This week our CSA sent us home with squash blossoms! Squash blossoms are high in calcium and iron and vitamins A and C. They’re incredibly fragile and don’t last long so if you have the opportunity to come across some, cook’em fast!

(Click on photos to enlarge.)

Ingredients

squash blossoms, red onion, green onion / scallion, garlic, cilantro, sharp cheddar cheese, bread, salt, pepper, olive oil.

Step One- Gently but thoroughly wash blossoms (checking for bugs), remove stems and stamen. Set aside.

Step Two – Dice garlic, red onion and green onion. Saute in pan with oil until the onions are white. Cook on low heat and do not let the onions or garlic burn.

Step Three- Roughly chop cilantro, add to mixture in pan. Add blossoms. Cook on low heat for 5 minutes or until moisture has left blossoms. Do not over cook or burn. Add salt and pepper to taste. Remove from heat and set aside.

(note: in making this dish again I would use olive oil instead of coconut oil. The taste of coconut was very prevalent and almost overpowered the other tastes.)

(above photos – green and red onions grown in our backyard, blossoms and cilantro from our CSA, and elephant garlic was a housewarming gift from a friend.)

Step Four- Shred your cheese and set aside. When making a grilled cheese I prefer shredded to slices. I personally feel it melts more quickly and evenly than a slice. Sliced cheese, however, does tend to make a gooy-er sandwich. So it’s all about what you prefer! For this dish I used sharp cheddar. I am a BIG FAN of cheese. Really I could eat cheese every day and never be tired of it. I can list on 1 hand the cheeses I don’t like – swiss (done and done.) I like to experiment with various cheeses in dishes but for me, if you’re putting cheddar on a grilled cheese, it can only be sharp.

Step Five- Toast your bread. Some people place the bread directly into the pan for grilling, but I like my sandwiches crunchy! Toasting the bread ahead of time accomplishes this for me.

 

Step Six- Put it all together! Use the same pan you used to saute the blossoms. The oil residue eliminates the need for buttering your bread. Cook on medium heat. As the bread is already toasted, too high heat will burn the bread.

 

Step Seven – finished project! Served today with a sliced peach and an El Burro Gold Brick Pale Ale from Trader Joe’s and enjoyed while watching Orioles/ Tigers and Chargers/Jets.

(This was a decent beer, especially for a pale ale. Nice and refreshing on this unnecessarily hot October Sunday.)

Final Tally

Number of Farm Fresh ingredients – 5

Number of Store Bought Ingredients – 3

Lars’ Rating – 8

My Rating- 6 1/2

 

(On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being his own personal Hell, 10 being life changing.)