Baked escarole with onions and gruyere

November 5, 2012 at 1:32 pm (Fall recipes, Necessarily nonvegan, Peter Berley, Quick weeknight recipe, Spring recipes, unrated, Vegetable dishes)

As you can see, I’m on an escarole kick.  I’m so excited to have found it after four years, that I’m trying every escarole recipe I can find.  This one is from the autumn section of Peter Berley’s Fresh Food Fast.   It’s actually called baked eggs with escarole but the dish seemed more escarole-y than eggy to me, so I’ve renamed it.

The recipe is pretty simple.  Saute some onions in a large skillet until soft, steam a 1 lb. bunch of escarole for a few minutes, then mix it in with the onions.  Then you beat four eggs with some grated gruyere, salt and pepper, and stir the eggs into the escarole and onion mixture.  You cook just until the eggs start to set, then put the pan in the oven to bake until the eggs have set.  You finish the dish off under the broiler to brown the top.

I used a cast-iron skillet to make this dish, and the sides of the pan weren’t seasoned so well so the eggs stuck to the sides.  But otherwise it worked well.  One annoyance I have with the recipe is Berley doesn’t specify how much salt to add.  He says to “whisk together the eggs, cheese, and salt and pepper to taste”.  Who seasons raw eggs to taste??   I think I added 1/4 tsp. salt, which ended up about right.

Neither Derek nor I like frittatas, and this dish is kind of like a frittata, at least in technique.  But there’s so much escarole and so few eggs, that it ends up extremely moist.  The egg serves to bind the escarole more than the escarole adding flavor to the eggs.

I wonder if it’s really necessary to steam the escarole.  It seems like you could just pan-steam it in the skillet with the onions.

Berley says this dish serves four, but Derek and I split it for breakfast.  Derek liked it, but didn’t love it.  I’d definitely make it again though.  Also, Berley says that the escarole can be substituted by another green like tender dandelion, chard, or beet greens.

The dish is in a menu with chipotle roasted potatoes, which I also made, but on another day.  I’ll blog about them in another post.