This week I selected endive and eggs. The endive is something I have avoided for many years because of the bitterness. But, I’d like to plant this in my garden this year as an alternative to the lettuce I am accustomed to eating. I used the following as a recipe and I think I am on to something. I will need to keep playing around with it to seriously consider endive a staple in my menu planning. I am pushing myself here and trying to unseat myself from the comfort zone.
Dressing
fresh lemon juice
garlic clove, coarsely chopped
olive oil
grated Parmesan cheese
Salad
1 head curly endive, wilted
pine nuts
Kalamata olives
The decision to include eggs was partially sentimental and partly because I am not quite ready to eliminate eggs from my diet. Ideally I’d like to eat like a vegan and be able to grow all of my own food. As I wrote last week, I am also not ready to give up dairy. BTW, I successfully made yogurt from my organic milk this week – using only a pan and bowl with a lid. It is now inside a cheesecloth sling I tied to the refrigerator rack over a bowl full of the dripping whey. I look forward to my homemade yogurt cheese later today. Back to vegetarian variations. The chart below would indicate that I would be categorized as eating an ovo-lacto vegetarianism diet. I like that. It sounds so wonderfully female.
So lacto or ovo variations on vegetarianism are still mostly plants.
| Foods in the main vegetarian diets | ||||
| Diet Name | Eggs | |||
| No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| No | No | Yes | Yes | |
| No | Yes | No | Yes | |
| No | No | No | No | |
The sentimental reason for my eating eggs is for the tradition, the rituals within my family relationship with my son. It started at his 5th birthday when I was working as Sous Chef at a Jesuit Community, Creighton University. It had become a real challenge for me to keep coming up with different dishes at breakfast. One of the favorites was baked eggs in bacon rings. I fixed it often enough to become proficient. So, on that freezing Midwest birthday morning I decorated the breakfast table and fixed the birthday boy eggs in bacon rings, but I re-named them ‘Lord of the Rings’ eggs. I believe we were reading the hobbit at the time or we had been to the animated version of Lord of the Rings. He was enchanted.
In fact, he wrote this on his application for Culinary School.
On my fifth birthday my mother cooked a simple breakfast of eggs and bacon. The way my mother plated the breakfast has stuck with me for 21 years. She called these eggs “Lord of the Rings.” She baked an egg wrapped in bacon with a teaspoon of tomato sauce and chili powder at the bottom of a muffin tin and out popped the most interesting and delicious breakfast I had seen in my five years on earth. Now, I don’t remember what presents I got or what I did that day to celebrate my birthday, but I still remember the “Lord of the Rings.” That is why I love to cook. You can start out with the simplest ingredients and with a little thought, a lot of heart and some time; you can create a meal or dish or just a taste that someone might remember for the rest of his life.
He now is a General Manager of a local restaurant where he’d been the Executive Chef. We cook together most holidays and enjoy the process. I am proud of him, his cooking and his loving respect for his mom. When he was 32 I decided to make a ritual of our mutual appreciation of cooking and my homage to the egg. I blew the yolk from thirty-two eggs and then 
decorated each egg with a decoupaged picture of him at the age of each egg’s year. I was also supporting his plan to build his own nest egg, so this was incorporated into the concept. Another reason for this ritual was my own need to establish a way to show love and celebration for his birthdays, without my having an income. I was unemployed and I knew this was going to be the norm as I grew older. So now I know I can fix an egg each year, decorated with something significant about the year with a photo.
Of course I couldn’t omit the Lord of the Rings from this 32nd birthday celebration. I did experiment with another plating challenge. I sprinkled shredded parmesan cheese on a plate, melted it in the microwave and then turned it over a bowl to cool, to harden into a nest shape. This is how I served the bacon wrapped eggs. I just loved the salty flavor, the texture and it fed my joy over beautiful food. I wish I had less blurry photographs to remember the day.
Endive in bowl
