the hungry bambino

Pickle recently found Chris’s very old copy of Of Mice and Men and has been carrying it around because it has a bunny on it (his latest obsession). It’s really quite cute: he’ll sit in one of our living-room chairs and open the book and peruse the words on the pages for a little while and then close the book, point at it and say, “Bunny.”

How does this relates to cooking or getting him to eat his dinner, you ask? It doesn’t really, but it does remind me of the verse that the title is derived from: “the best laid plans of mice and men,” which Steinbeck snagged from a Robert Burn’s poem (I digress).

Day to day; week to week, we all have good intentions — plans set out in our mind of things to accomplish, meals to make, laundry to fold, bills to pay, but sometimes those things don’t go off as planned, which is why everyone should have a solid back-up plan — especially when it comes to weeknight dinners.

From one of my menus a few weeks ago (week of 3 January to be exact), we were to have lentil salad with curry spices and yogurt. Well, that day we got slammed with a foot of snow and once I got home from work, I realized that I did not have the lentils for the salad and was not going to venture out again just for some French lentils. As Pickle would say, “uh-oh.”

Enter my go-to, failsafe, always-have-the-ingredients dinner: Turkish Poached Eggs with Yogurt and Spicy Sage Butter. The recipe is from a 1995 issue of Bon Appétit and whoever was the genius who thought to make it and print it in the magazine, thank you! The recipe is simple: poached eggs, Greek yogurt with some minced garlic and salt in it, a few crispy sage leaves and a very sexy-looking paprika-and-chile-infused butter to drizzle on top. I serve it with some multi-grain flatbread and dinner is served.

It’s perfect for dinner alone; for all three of us; for a first-course of a Middle Eastern-themed dinner party. Pickle loves it – I make sure his eggs are poached until the yolks are firm. He says, “Mmmm,” when he eats it and that makes me smile, which then makes me very happy that my plans were waylaid …and and isn’t that what makes life great?

Happy eating, -s.