3 Easy Dinner Recipes Featuring Eggs, Eggs, & More Eggs

Eggs are a one-minute, emergency dinner—fry an egg, plop on toast, squiggle with ketchup or hot sauce—but they can be so much more without a ton of effort on your part.

My new cookbook, I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To), has an entire chapter devoted to dinners built on eggs. That’s how much I depend on, believe in, and love eggs. Each chapter in my book organizes the recipes further by the techniques used to turn the main ingredient into dinner. That way, you have the moves that’ll get you dinner, even when following a recipe is just not happening tonight.

There are three ways I make eggs into dinner: whisk, soft boil, and fry. What follows is a recipe showing off each technique, plus a video. Hold onto the recipes for dear life or use their blueprints to take advantage of what you have in the fridge (most likely, it’ll be eggs).

Creamed Leeks & Eggs

Pour beaten eggs into a warm skillet and they can fluff and puff into any number of dinners. Beyond the classic scramble, make a frittata (essentially a cake of scrambled eggs), an omelet (a folded pancake of scrambled eggs), and ribbons of scrambled eggs swimming through soup (think: egg drop soup, hot and sour soup,, sopa de ajo, stracciatella).

These Creamed Leeks & Eggs pair scrambled eggs with warm cream with leeks and lemon peel. It’s such a soft and soothing dinner, you barely have to chew.

Godmother’s Egg Salad

A bowlful of boiled eggs in the fridge can quickly lead to very good dinners. In the Godmother’s Egg Salad, fudge-like yolks mix with oil and mustard to make the creamy, mayo-like dressing. The salad has red wine vinegar, salami, dried oregano, pickled peppers, and red onion. It’s inspired by an Italian sub—specifically the Godmother at Bay Cities Deli in Santa Monica, California.

Crispy Potato, Egg & Cheese Tacos

A fried egg is like a dinnertime weighted blanket: Lay one atop toast, yogurt, salad greens, and other random bits, which somehow become dinner. We can rest easy. These Crispy Potato, Egg & Cheese Tacos use the same ingredients you might see in a breakfast taco but in ways that create a whole lot of fun, contrasting textures. These tacos have gooey and frico-like cheese like in costra tacos, very crispy potato reminiscent of Josh Ozerzky’s snowflake-like hash browns, and the molten yolk of a fried egg. In just 15 minutes and one pan, you have a taco middle with pizzazz. Eat and repeat.

Have you picked up a copy of Ali Slagle's new cookbook yet?