I love to complain

Yesterday, being the true blogging geek that I am, I fired off a (polite) e-mail to the good people at our dear BlogHer ad network. I noted that my headlines don't appear in the rotating list under the ad bloc very often anymore, and I noted that perhaps this was because I don't post about recipes very often. Most of the headlines in the Food and Drink category seem to lead, no-nonsense like, back to blogs with a recipe.

The nice people at BlogHer responded almost instantly -- on a Sunday, no less -- with helpful suggestions. And then this morning, I began my news surf over at Orangette, where I am one of those readers called a "lurker" because I never comment. And lo and behold! Not only did Orangette today give me the idea of perhaps creating a sidebar "Index of food pairings" a la Molly's "Index of recipes" (my, she has a lot of those), but I saw that one of her most recent posts detailed a simple dish of a fried egg on a bed of kale on toast.

Mercy, I thought -- I can do that. My egg is poached, and the greens are spinach, not kale, but otherwise it's the same. Is it all right if the photograph was taken last April? I make this all the time.



Having pillaged the idea from somebody else -- and even Molly got it from a restaurant -- what do I have here? A recipe, just when I had been complaining that recipes are "not my strong point," and could my blog be listed as some other category besides Food and Drink, so that my headlines have a chance to circulate freely out there in that portion of the ethernet that is not quite so devoted to the editorial strictures of "how to." The nice people at BlogHer are going to want to smack me, and who can blame them.

Even the recipe itself hardly counts as one. Make toast and butter it. Boil some water in a shallow pan. Place a handful of fresh spinach into it, stir it, let it wilt -- this is almost instantaneous -- and take it out with a fork. While it is draining on a paper towel, poach an egg in the nice green spinach water. There is only one trick to making a poached egg, and that is to learn, through practice, how to pry the egg gently off the bottom of the pan without breaking the yolk into the water. The egg will stick, and that's that. Neither greasing the bottom of the pan first, nor adding vinegar to the water, nor creating a whirlpool in the water before adding the egg, has ever helped me.

Watch your timing. When you have pried the egg off the bottom of the pan and it is done, lift it out of the water, drain it on paper towel, and place it on top of the bed of spinach which you have piled on the buttered toast. Add salt and pepper, and you are ready for lunch.

Somehow, tea or coffee seem a better match with this than wine, unless it is a dark and snowy winter afternoon and you want a small glass of something powerful, red, and warming with it. Or even -- a sip of tawny port, and then a little chocolate?

And then a nap, probably. You should wake up refreshed, with nothing to complain about.