A perfect meal

Yesterday was a pretty strange day. A lot of lateness all around due to strange unexpected things like missed trains and getting on the wrong one (oops), but upon coming home last night Aimee and I were faced with a dilemma - like a handful of nights every week - what to eat? We had some really nice roots in the fridge from our last CSA pick-up which also included some spinach along with the sweet potatoes, squash, turnips, etc. but there was little else and no real desire to do up a long roast in the oven on any of those roots. Neither one of us wanted to go back out in the slushy rain and (a) give up our parking space or (b) trudge through the night to get some just "okay" food.

Then Aimee made the suggestion that we do have some dried pasta and that got my mind working. Before I knew it I was preparing a dish that in my not-so-humble opinion could easily have been featured on a dining menu. Okay, I thought: Pasta? check; spinach? check; garlic? shallots? check and check; breadcrumbs? uh-oh, nope. I was thinking of doing a type of carbonara that I had in Rome with breadcrumbs, but since there was none to be had I just went with what there was.

The final dish was a divine mix of all of those plus some duck breast pastrami that I had left over from Formaggio Kitchen with a perfect poached egg on top. The pasta was a chipotle fettuccine cooked to a nice toothy al dente topped with a mix of shallots cooked in butter to which the duck pastrami was added then the spinach was steamed over making an incredible sauce. The poached egg was placed atop a nice mound of the spinach and the whole thing was sprinkled with finely chopped crispy garlic that I fried in some Mangalitsa pig rendered leaf lard and then grated some parmigiano reggiano over to combine (in lieu of breadcrumbs it was divine).

I of course didn't take a minute to photograph it because it was just dinner, but it remains in my memory this morning as incredible. What made it all the better was while I was cooking it and after we finished eating it, Aimee was reading out of a book that we are sharing right now, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball, which is about as romantic a book as I can imagine without sinking into the saccharine, and highly recommended.

The best thing I learned from the dinner was to not be afraid of poaching eggs. Most places I've seen information on poaching the egg say to boil the water and then tip the egg in while wrapping it around with a spoon so it doesn't completely break and sometimes vinegar is said to make it easier. Well, I broke the eggs straight from their shells into water that was just coming up to a boil (but wasn't there yet) and that had some white vinegar added to it. You know when you're watching a pot of water come to a boil there's that long stage where small bubbles are coming up the sides of the pot and it seems to take forever for the water to change from that state to even a simmer, let alone a boil? That is the time when I gently cracked and lowered my eggs into the water and kept them there for a good few minutes. I didn't stir with a spoon to keep everything together, I didn't even put the eggs into ramekins before slipping them in the water. This may not be news to anyone else, but I don't think I'll ever go back to the specially designed poaching pan that is über difficult to clean.