Baked Eggs with Mushrooms and Gruyere

aha - yeah, i kind of did that. i will break them next time

There are a variety of other cheeses you could use, but probably something like comte or a nice swiss would work well.

Cast iron sides are too thick for a clean crack on the shell. Learned this the hard way years ago when I first switched to cast iron for all my pans ;)

I'm glad it was helpful Elegante! I know there is just so much nutrition information out there to wade through, and there is unfortunately a lot of very poor quality journalism about nutrition, where they're just trying to get a headline instead of really helping the public understand; and most doctors have such old info since they never receive nutrition training! I'm afraid I'm in Minnesota, so no office in NY or CT. If you'd like a useful book for explaining some good science about healthful eating, check out The Perfect Health Diet. Their website is helpful too. They base their dietary advice off of sound science, and their recommendations are especially good for people dealing with chronic disease like heart disease or diabetes. Their diet doesn't allow any grains or legumes or sugar, which are often important to eliminate if someone already has a condition. For people who are healthy, different people have different genes, so we have different responses to grains and legumes - some people tolerate whole grains and legumes fine, some don't - you kind of have to experiment and really listen to your body about what makes you feel best there. And, even though they're not healthy, I like to allow myself a treat now and then, so I do eat food with white flour and sugar sometimes, but my rule is to listen to my body and determine whether a treat is really, truly what I want to eat at that moment, and if I'm eating sweets, or pasta, or bread, I only eat it if it's really high quality and amazing and so it will be worth it. And then I enjoy the heck out of it! I think a lot of people's struggle with eating comes from our tendency to be extreme - extreme rigidity that caves and turns into extreme binging, and back and forth between those two poles - and lack of being mindful about our food (too much casual snacking! :). I truly believe a lot of health problems would be solved if people focused on eating real food, and paid close attention while they were eating to what they're eating so they can fully savor it without eating as much, and to who they're eating with so that eating is a nourishing, joyful, communal experience. My two cents! :)

Your "two cents" is worth a fortune to me. My husband is diabetic and I have high cholesterol. Even after losing 15lbs my cholesterol was 263 but my ratio was good. That made me crazy. I did not know grains and legumes could be a problem. I will get that book and start advancing my studies. THANK YOU Again!

Accepted. :)

Thanks!

David, food52 is a place for fostering community and providing resources and constructive feedback for home cooks. It works because the community maintains a positive spirit, and when they have feedback they provide it in a constructive fashion. Unkind, unhelpful, uninformed remarks are not a welcome way of interacting with this community. In other words, no one asked you, but you can certainly vomit on your own time if you so choose.

Haha, you're right. I normally make the recipe with four eggs, but when I made it to photograph I ran out of eggs - only had three! So, I made a 3/4s recipe.

Yum.

They also happen during the daytime and at sporting events and even when having sex. You don’t want to ban the last do you?

Insane? Seriously? Getting yourself all wound up about a recipe will raise your blood pressure too. I would think that folks with cholesterol or heart issues would simply pass on this recipe. Doesn't seem like there's a need to issue dire warnings about heart attacks during the night. Sheesh.

Hi Elegante! In general I try not to talk nutrition on food52 because - as someone who actually has a PhD in nutrition - I find too much focus on nutrition can ruin the fun of cooking, though it is certainly important for people with health issues. That said, it always saddens/infuriates me that the public is still usually fed the old dogma that cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease. Those statements were based on bad science from decades ago, but unfortunately physicians receive almost no nutrition education, and RDs are remarkably slow to change their advice in response to better science. But, basically research has shown that cholesterol in your diet has virtually no impact on cholesterol in your body because your body moderates synthesis in response to intake. Saturated fat has a neutral impact on cholesterol, ie. it raises your good cholesterol as much as the bad - and the balance between HDL and LDL cholesterol is more important than total cholesterol - and finally, the link between cholesterol levels and heart disease is a tenuous one at best. It appears that high cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease but can be a marker that there is a different underlying problem that is causing both elevated cholesterol and risk of heart disease. That underlying problem is inflammation, and inflammation is caused by a variety of things but most especially too high intakes of sugar and vegetable oils (corn, soy, canola and other seed oils...) as well as stress. I think the best thing we can all do is strive for balance, which for most people should include getting rid of processed junk foods as much as possible, reducing our intake of sugar, vegetable oil, non-nutritive beverages, and processed grains, eating lots more fruits and vegetables and small fishies, and just altogether doing a good job of cooking real food with lots of flavor and savoring it instead of trying to restrict ourselves to an ascetic, unsatisfying diet most of the time and then caving and eating a box of cookies or a whole bag of chips in secret. Really sorry this is a little bit of a lecture, but hopefully it's helpful! :)

Hi fiveandspice, I'd be really interested in more info on the vegetable oils issue. I eat lacto-ovo vegetarian, leaning toward more pure vegetarian, and so usually use more olive oil vs. butter. Where would you recommend I seek more info on this? I know you weren't replying to me, but your comment was so well put-together I thought I'd ask.

Hi Kate! Olive oil doesn't count as a vegetable oil, actually. Olives are a fruit, and a traditional source of oil. Generally, most of the traditional sources of fat (including olive oil, coconut oil, butter, even lard and beef tallow - and nut oils are pretty good too) are relatively healthy because our bodies are adapted to using them. Olive oil provides mono-unsaturated fat, which is generally quite healthy, you just don't want to cook with it at too high of heat because it will destabilize. The "vegetable oils" that are a problem are the ones that are high in omega-6 fatty acids. These tend to come from plants that aren't naturally very high in oil (corn, soy, safflower, canola), so we're adapted to eating this type of fatty acid in small amounts, but not in the large amounts that people now usually consume them in because so many processed products, baked goods, etc. use vegetable oil. So, the problem isn't omega-6 fats in general - they're actually essential in small amounts - but the fact that we eat too much of them in comparison with omega-3 fats (which mostly come from seafood, kelp, and animals that are raised on pasture instead of grain). Generally I'm wary of health information on the internet, but I've found some sites that d a pretty good job of explaining the science in an accessible way. Here's one little summary: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/06/omega-3-fats-and-cardiovascular-disease/ And here are a whole bunch of blog posts about fats from another guy who does a pretty good job talking about it: http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/search/label/Vegetable%20Oils%20and%20PUFA
Of course, the other tricky thing is that science is always evolving. Studies are never definitive, just suggestive. That's the way science works. So, whenever someone starts treating a diet approach like religions I get wary. I try to look to how people have been eating for hundreds (even thousands of years) more than to science! :)

Thanks for the info! Very helpful, I'll check it out. Also looking forward to trying this recipe, it looks delicious.