How to Eat Fried & Scrambled Eggs at Once

Each Thursday, Emily Vikre (a.k.a. fiveandspice) will be sharing a new way to love breakfast -- because breakfast isn't just the most important meal of the day. It's also the most awesome.

Today: Fried or scrambled eggs? You don't have to choose -- marbleize them instead.

No, this isn’t a cooking for kids column -- Merrill and Nicholas have that very well covered. However, I happen to have a one-and-a-half-year-old little guy named Espen, so a lot of the cooking I do these days is for a kid, including breakfast. Ever since he started on solid foods, this particular kid was an egg fanatic. I am too, so it has worked out well. I’ll get up in the morning, fumble for coffee, hoist him onto my hip, and scramble us a couple of eggs. When I began this little morning routine, I would make myself two eggs and Espen would get a couple bites of them. Gradually -- so gradually it actually took me a bit to notice -- I realized my portion of eggs was getting smaller and smaller. Within a few months, I was hoovering half of the eggs into my mouth at a record pace, just so I would get something to eat before the little boss man took it all for himself. That was when I started to cook 3, then 4, eggs at a time.

"Don't mind me. Just eating some eggs."

Since Espen is an established egg lover, he has his favorite preparation: scrambled -- except, it’s only sort-of scrambled. Because I was cracking and scrambling eggs with one hand while holding a (bigger and bigger) baby with the other, the scrambling was more like a half-scramble, half-fry with swirls of yolk and white mingling together. Espen got used to this style of egg, and now he looks perturbed if I actually scramble his eggs. I thought I was just being lazy with my scrambling, so imagine my surprise when I saw a breakfast sandwich recipe in the February issue of Saveur from a chef who called this very way of preparing eggs “marbleizing.” I wasn’t being lazy -- I was being fancy without even realizing it!

Espen isn’t super fancy and likes his eggs plain, but I like to spoon things on top of mine from time to time, be it guacamole, crème fraîche, hot sauce, or whatever else I can dig out of the fridge. As soon as vaguely springlike weather rolls around, one of my favorite things to do is use handfuls of herbs to make salsa verde. The bright combination of herbs, lemon, garlic, capers, and olive oil is good on virtually anything, which most definitely includes eggs.

Marbleized Eggs with Salsa Verde

Serves 1

For the salsa verde:

1/2 cup flat leaf parsley
2 tablespoons fresh mint
1 small garlic clove, peeled and chopped
1 pinch salt
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon capers

For the eggs:

1/2 tablespoon butter
2 large eggs
Salt, to taste

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here.

Photos by Emily Vikre.