Spinach Mushroom Egg Scramble

I have been writing for RecipeSpinoff for seven and a half years now. Nearly four hundred weeks. The blog has evolved from recipe posts to essays to something that I can only describe as a serial memoir — an ongoing, weekly, public diary of a life organized around food and family and the specific Jewish experience of standing in a kitchen and cooking through everything. The readership has grown steadily, not virally — I do not go viral; I am a sixty-six-year-old Jewish woman from Long Island, viral is not my medium — but steadily, the way books sell when they are good: person to person, hand to hand, "you have to read this" to "you have to read this."

I wrote a post this week about teaching Ethan to make rugelach — the post I've been thinking about since the summer, about hands and dough and the chain of learning that passes from grandmother to child. The post was shared more than most of my posts, because people respond to the image of the nine-year-old boy with flour on his hands, learning his great-grandmother's recipe from his grandmother's hands, the genetic and culinary chain made visible in a single afternoon in a kitchen on Long Island. I didn't mention that the boy's grandfather is in a memory care facility ten miles away. Some posts don't need the grief. Some posts are just the joy.

I made a simple roasted chicken — the Thursday chicken, which is now the whatever-day chicken, because retirement has liberated the chicken from its Thursday prison and the chicken can happen on any day, at any time, for any reason or no reason. The chicken was perfect. It is always perfect. The perfection of the chicken is the one reliable thing in an unreliable world, and I cling to it.

The chicken taught me something I already knew but needed to be reminded of: that the most reliable things in the kitchen are also the simplest. On the days when the calendar is empty and the house is quiet and I am not teaching anyone anything — when I am just feeding myself and my husband and not performing the beautiful transmission of tradition — I make something like this scramble. Spinach, mushrooms, eggs, heat. It is not the Thursday chicken, but it carries the same logic: a few honest ingredients treated with care, ready in minutes, perfect every time. Perfection does not have to be complicated. That is the whole point.

Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 10 minutes | Total Time: 15 minutes | Servings: 2

Ingredients

4 large eggs
2 tablespoons whole milk or cream
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
6 oz cremini or button mushrooms, sliced
2 cups fresh baby spinach
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)
Fresh chives or parsley, chopped, for garnish

Instructions

Whisk the eggs. In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper until the yolks and whites are fully combined. Set aside.
Cook the mushrooms. Heat the olive oil in a non-stick or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sliced mushrooms in a single layer and cook undisturbed for 3 minutes, until golden on one side. Stir and cook another 2 minutes until the mushrooms are browned and any moisture has evaporated. Season lightly with salt.
Add garlic and spinach. Reduce heat to medium. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the spinach and toss until just wilted, about 1 minute. If using red pepper flakes, add them now.
Scramble the eggs. Push the vegetables to one side of the pan and add the butter to the cleared space. Once melted, pour in the egg mixture. Let the eggs begin to set at the edges, then use a spatula to gently fold them in large, slow curds, incorporating the vegetables as you go. Remove the pan from the heat while the eggs are still slightly underdone — residual heat will finish them.
Serve immediately. Divide between two plates, garnish with fresh chives or parsley, and serve at once with toast or crusty bread.

Nutrition (per serving)

Spinach Mushroom Egg Scramble — The Reliable Thing in an Unreliable World