Emergency Steak and Egg Breakfast

Saturdays are shopping days for me, so Saturday breakfast usually is an emergency amalgam of whatever I have left over from the week. Also, I like to keep dirty dish generation to a minimum so there's not a lot of kitchen-cleaning to do to spoil an otherwise nice Saturday morning.

Frequently that means veggie egg pie, but I had leftover steak from last night so decided to make some steak and eggs with a sauce. The first picture shows my mis en place - which basically cleans out my fridge. The second shows the finished dish, including the sauce. Dirty dishes included one fry pan, one small mixing bowl, one spoon, and one spatula. So, a success!

Courtney's Emergency Steak and Eggs
Serves 2

This recipe reflects what I used this morning. You can be creative, but less so than with egg pie. The spinach or some sort of cooked green is essential. Switching out meats or using no meat at all would be fine, though.

2T ghee for frying (ghee really does make a difference, but you can use any animal fat)
1 slice of onion
3 large mushrooms
100g (3-1/2 oz) spinach leaves
~150g leftover steak (bone removed) approx 2 cm thick
4 eggs
few twists black pepper
paprika for garnish

For sauce:
2T yogurt
1/2T sour cream
1/2T mayonnaise
1/2T brown mustard (I used Koskiusko)
1/2t Worchestershire sauce

Mix sauce ingredients. If the ingredients are coming straight from the fridge, use a microwave-safe bowl and microwave it on 1/3 power for 30 seconds - just enough to take the chill off. Set aside.

Warm serving plates.

Remove stems from spinach and wash leaves. Slice mushrooms. Chop onion into a medium dice. Cut steak into four pieces by cutting it first in half and then through the middle so that you have 4 slices approximately 1 cm thick. (please be sure your slicing knife is sharp before you do this!).

Melt 1T of the ghee in a heavy large frypan until just fragrant. Add onions and saute 2 min. Add mushrooms and saute until they are golden, 3-4 min. Add spinach and saute until limp. Divide between the two plates (see picture).

Return pan to heat. Add 1/2 T ghee. When melted, add the steak, putting the cooked side down and the side you just exposed up. Saute (do not flip) just long enough to reheat. Put 2 steak slices on each plate. Pepper to taste (you should not need extra salt with this dish, but if you want it, put it on at this time).

Return pan to heat. Add the other 1/2 T ghee. When melted, fry the eggs in the ghee to your desired degree of doneness.

Put one egg on each of the slices of meat. Divide the sauce evenly among the four eggs, gently spooning the sauce onto the eggs. Garnish with paprika. Serve right away.

As an aside, I like my eggs with the yolks definitely runny and, in a dish like this, with the whites a little runny, too. Phil likes his yolks only a little runny and his whites completely firm. So I start his eggs cooking earlier and flip them much earlier than mine, which I only flip right at the end to get a little bit of a skin over the yolk. But because of that and the sauce, I recommend serving this dish in a shallow bowl like I've used or in a plate with a decent rim to it.