A Breakfast Salad Morning

I wouldn’t really call this a recipe as much as it is a food diary - I think I need to rework how I move forward with sharing what I eat because writing out a recipe doesn’t feel natural to me since I cook based on the ingredients I have in my fridge and combine based on the flavors that I know and crave in that moment. Food diary might also be an incorrect description as well because I am not tracking and monitoring how much I consume and what I am eating as much as I am trying to share the dishes I make. I don’t really write recipes, and I know I am often asked “Brenda, please share how you made this,” and my answer often is “I threw it together!” So I’m going to start writing out how I threw it together, and what I did leading up to this meal. This feels like my high school Xanga (ayyyy anyone remember me, @lovesporks), sometimes we have to go back to our roots, you know?

This morning, I finished a workout and felt really good. I have been following yoga stretches on the Peloton app lately (thanks Nicole for giving me access to your account) and have been focusing on increasing my mobility. I recently got two yoga blocks from Target because I didn’t understand how else I could modify the instructions I was watching when I didn’t have the exact tools they had on screen. Ha. Anyway, it’s been a fantastic way to get my day going , especially since I am an early riser normally.

Kimchi had a grooming appointment this morning on my block, and after dropping him off, I realized I didn’t have any more iced coffee in my fridge and wasn’t sure if I felt like making a fresh batch of coffee and waiting for it to cool. Yes, iced coffee all year round for me. There was a dunks across the street, so I picked up a medium cold brew that was mostly ice, and headed back to my apartment to make breakfast.

As always, I am convinced if I add eggs onto a normal meal, it is a breakfast iteration. I go to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market and pick up most of my weekly ingredients there. Maybe next time I go, I’ll break down what a regular haul looks like for me in a post and what are my weekly fridge staples that I cook with. I had this salad mix with curled endive, radicchio, baby lettuce, and arugula from two weeks ago in my fridge (I can’t remember the exact farm name, I do know the stall how it is left of the Roan Mills stall across from Golden Hearts at HFM, alongside some sliced wilty green onions (picked up from Golden Heart Farms). I tossed the greens with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, and drizzled Pacifica Honey’s sage honey.

For the toast, because I love carbs, I sliced a piece of Roan Mills San Francisco sourdough and toasted it in a garlic oil on my cast iron. The garlic oil is from the seven bulbs of garlic confit I made a couple weeks ago for a dinner with my neighbors I hosted. Toasting the bread in the garlic oil gave the slice an aromatic crisp where that beautiful and sweet garlic flavor soaked into the dough of the sourdough.

I topped the garlic toast with a whipped feta that I made by grabbing a block of feta (also from the HFM, cannot remember the name of the stall - it is on the Selma Ave entrance of the HFM next to the coffee stall, and the person working the stall is constantly opening up containers from his booth to give samples to folks walking by and it is such a delight), using my immersion blender to mix with EVOO, garlic, paprika, cayenne, thyme, red pepper flakes.

I get a lot of slack for how expensive my eggs are, but if you are someone like me who eats eggs regularly, good eggs really make a difference in my meals. I pick up a carton of Santa Barbara’s Lily’s Eggs from the HFM - the heirloom egg dozen carton is $13. If there are enough, sometimes they have a carton of all green eggs, those are $15. I cooked in my carbon steel pan two eggs in garlic oil, and then I layered the eggs on top of my greens. With my kitchen shears, I cut chives and dill on top of the eggs and toast, and of course added some flaky salt and freshly grated black pepper.

My pepper grinder is actually a broken pepper grinder I’ve reused over and over again from Sprouts - I should probably get a “fancy” pepper grinder at some point, but it works and I keep refilling it with whole peppercorns so I don’t see the problem.

In a sense, this meal is a “salad” because it has leafy greens. Or is this meal a bowl of lettuce with stuff on top? Is that not a salad? We don’t need to get technical here with the name, I suppose. All in all, this meal was refreshing and filing. It had a bit of a sweet component with the honey, savory with the s+p and spices, balance of textures between the crunch of the bread, creaminess of the yolk and the feta, and bite of the greens. These are the types of meals that get me going through my days of working from home.