Eggs Florentine

Whether the Paleo diet is a new food movement or not seems to be a hard one to tell mostly because what tends to be called Paleo is simply what people used to eat before the onrush of processed food and heavier intake of sugar and corn syrup  The Paleo food pyramid, if anything, looks a lot like what our ancestors would find most handy and agreeable to digestion, starting at the top as nuts and seeds, then fruit and berries, veggies, naturally occurring fats, oils, and dairy (not processed), and on the bottom, the widest berth, is given to pastured meats and wild fish.  The key terms here are fresh and natural; so heirloom fruits and veggies and, if at all possible, grass-fed animal meat and eggs.  Where this throwback concept meets the Mediterranean diet, we find a very rich, bright, and nutritious diet which, when combined with an older version of a European 'slower' lifestyle, the body begins receive what it has always wanted not just what is most available or convenient.  The Eggs Florentine recipe is a

wonderful introduction – basically a bread stacked on with spinach, tomato, poached eggs, seasoning and hollandaise sauce.  Sided by herring and some dried beans, and its Paleo all the way, quick, fresh and bright.

The recipe calls for a homemade version of a French biscuit, made with the famous herbes de Provence, but a simple English muffin worked fine for the base of this version.  A clump of spinach is tossed in for sautee along with fresh basil, in butter – or we tried avocado oil to go along with the fresh oils – then sliced tomatoes tossed on the same pan, each to stack on the muffin.  There's probably little doubt that homemade Hollandaise sauce is richer, creamier and more authentic, but we had a simple powder packet that is mixed with water and boiled until close to creamy which was just fine.  The fun part of this recipe is poached eggs, one of those ingredients that when done well are fun and soft.  The key to a poached eggs seems to be to add a little apple cider vinegar into a fairly deep pan of boiling water and to make sure that the egg is gently released into the water not from the shell itself (too

inconsistent), but from something like a small ramekin.  This allows for the egg to enter into the water but not bound down to the bottom where it begins to lose its shape.  If placed well, the eggs slowly bubbles around the pan, keeps its shape somewhat, and after two minutes can be pulled out with a slotted spoon, dried, and placed on top of the spinach and tomato mix where it waits for the creamy hollandaise and dashes of paprika.  The biscuits are hopefully low on grain; the vegetables are not seasoned but taste just like themselves; the egg, hot and like a bubble, takes the sauce perfectly, especially when the yolk begins to run over the rest of the dish.  You could easily see this short brunch style meal served in a cafe of a perched village somewhere in France or Spain, served with ice water and bar of Mediterranean sunshine reaching over the plate.