David Lentz's Tweety Scramble

I figured it was only fair, after trying and loving all those Suzanne Goin recipes, to give her husband's food a try as well. I mean, if she can cook the way she does, some of that must rub off on the old ball and chain, I figure. In addition to their kitchen prowess, I have to also say, could they be any prettier? (Single-girl night, TBS, "Friends" reruns, forgive me.) Check out the April issue of Vogue (like you don't want to know how Jen is doing) - there's an Annie Leibovitz photograph of Suzanne and David Lentz on a rock, and holy wow, they are good-looking folks. They seem awfully nice, too.

Anyway, back in the fall, the LA Times published a piece on slow-scrambled eggs and their superiority to the regular flash-in-the-pan scramble most of us are used to. The recipes included methods for cooking eggs in a double-boiler, which just seemed unusually fussy, and David Lentz's way, namely in a nonstick pan over a very low flame while stirring clockwise. Since I was going to be cooking a single-girl dinner last night, a plate of eggs and a few Ryvita would hit the spot. I think Ben would have revolted if I had served that little plate up there to him and said "Eat up! That's all there is." But for me, it was perfect.

I halved the recipe (12 eggs serve 4 to 6 people, but as it was going to be my dinner, I calculated 3 eggs for one serving), and used my cast-iron pan (clean-up was a proverbial bitch: I had to resort to coarse salt and now I have to re-season my pan, sigh). I was surprised at how much the eggs cooked down: that serving you see up there is three eggs (and that plate is tiny). Stirring the eggs clockwise felt a bit silly at times, but as the minutes ticked on and the scramble slowly began to come together, I figured David must have had a point. I made sure to err on the side of moistness and when the eggs were scrambled but still trembly and wet, I turned off the pan (having stirred in the herbs and cheese - I substituted Parmigiano for Jack) and let them sit for a minute before piling the fluffy curds onto my crackers.

I dolloped a little bit more creme fraiche on top of the eggs, then drizzled them with olive oil and dug in. They were delicious. Soft and creamy, with character and bite from the barely cooked herbs, and a grassy quality from the olive oil (Portuguese, on sale at Murray's, fantastic). I left off the herb salad that David piles on top of the eggs - it seemed like too much feathery, frondy busy-ness. My heart sort of stopped when I realized I'd be eating six eggs in the course of 12 hours (breakfast!), but then I read the insert that came with my organic eggs ("I don't worry too much about eating eggs. I love them and try to eat two a day. My father loved them and ate two a day, and lived to be 81; and his mother, Mrs. Zitella Bass, ate two eggs per day and lived to be 105!" - www.countryhen.com) and kept eating. After all, er, wouldn't the Ryvita balance everything out?