Recipe: Cavolo Nero, Eggs & Potato Florentine Bake

As with all these recipes you could use any kind of kale here, or spinach, or in season swap part or all of it for wild garlic and leave out the garlic cloves. This is a great leftovers dish: leftover roasties, leftover white/cheese sauce, leftover greens, leftover bits of cheese, leftover bread in the breadcrumbs – find them a new purpose in this comforting, ‘nursery food’ meal.

Don’t bother buying breadcrumbs! Save the ends of your loaves, adding them to a bag in the freezer. When you have enough, push them through the grating attachment on a food processor to turn them into breadcrumbs, and re-freeze until needed.

With some wild garlic flowers scattered over the top too :-)

Serves 2

Ingredients

200g cavolo nero / dark leafy greens
2 cloves garlic, crushed
400g cooked potatoes, ideally new potatoes
4 eggs
400ml milk
30g butter, plus a bit more to saute the kale in
30g flour
100g grated cheddar, plus a small handful extra to scatter over the top
50g grated Parmesan
Pinch of nutmeg or mace
1 teaspoon mustard – Dijon or wholegrain, or ½ teaspoon mustard powder
Black pepper
A big handful of breadcrumbs

Method

1.      Preheat the oven to 180C / gas mark 4.

2.      Make the cheese sauce:

·        Heat the butter in a large saucepan (ideally not non-stick or it might scratch if you need to use a whisk) until it just starts to foam – don’t let it colour or it’ll flavour the sauce. Tip in the flour, and cook it for two minutes over a medium heat to get rid of the floury taste.

·        Remove from the heat and pour in a splash of milk. With a wooden spoon, stir it into the roux (butter and flour mix) to start to loosen it up. Tip in another tiny bit and. Slowly add milk until it’s a smooth paste, then return to the heat to keep adding milk, more confidently now but always stirring. When it’s thinned a bit you’ll want to switch to a whisk to ward off lumps. Add the cheeses, mustard and nutmeg/mace and crack in some black pepper.

·        Keep the heat at medium and cook the sauce for around 10 minutes, stirring often, until it’s thick.

3.      While it’s thickening, remove the touch stalks from the cavolo nero / kale and roughly chop the leaves. Heat a small knob of butter with a drop of oil in a frying pan, and sauté the kale for a couple of minutes until soft – add a splash of water to speed the process up. Add the crushed garlic for the final minute, but don’t allow it to brown or burn.

4.      Pile the potatoes and cavolo nero into a baking dish, making sure they cover the bottom of the dish. Make four little nests for the eggs in the potato/kale mix and crack the eggs in. Gently cover the whole thing in cheese sauce, making sure not to break the yolks.

5. Scatter the breadcrumbs and remaining grated cheddar over the top and then bake for around 20 minutes until the top is golden and – ideally – the eggs whites are cooked but the yolks still soft.