CSA Cooking: Spinaci e rucola penne con ouvo

I'm starting a new blog theme hereabouts...  you all know the "Homestead Eating,"  well the new one is CSA cooking.  Our first share came this week, and I think I'll enjoy documenting how we eat/use/preserve the seasonal bounty.  The Farm Notes newsletters that come with the shares generally include a recipe, and they're soliciting member contributions, so here's to that!  Picking up the share, which included a stalk of lovage, our farm lady was jovially telling everyone to let her know what how to cook with it, and I couldn't help mentioning the bake a chicken breast with honey and lovage from now two years ago....  and I started to smell a blog post.  A whole series of them.  Not to mention that for newbies to the eat-seasonally-from-the-garden gig, a bag of sometime unkown and sometimes random veggies can certainly be intimidating:  so here's my edu-drop-in-a-bucket to you who is sitting out there longing to plant a garden or get into the kitchen.

Starting with the oh so simple peasant food that sounds oh so glamorous when you give it an italian name: Spinaci e rucola penne con ouvo!   Otherwise known as pasta with spinach, arugula and an egg.

One of my dearest friends in the world went to college at the American University in Rome (Italy), then fell in love and married an italian, and now works as the staff journalist for the European Space Agency in a picturesque hill town with a view of Rome.  When I went to her wedding a few years ago, I met a number of her college friends from AUR, and it was from one of these fantastic ladies that I learned this quintessential italian peasant food:

Start with pasta.  Add any veggies and/or beans that you have on hand.  Top with an egg.  Add cheese if you have it.  Salt and pepper is good.

So simple.  And a complete meal nutritionally, assuming that you do HAVE veggies on hand :-)

For this meal, I took two of the small bunches of greens that came in the CSA share.  Neither was enough for a complete meal, barely enough for a side.  Growing up vegetarian has given me the expectation that a meal is a mound of good green or orange red yellow vegetables with some other things, and even the sustainable family garden farm and outreach educate the kids to grow good food and eat it too ethos that informs Calypso can't make early summer first harvest greens bunches the giant size I secretly expect.  So!  I combined two of them: arugula and spinach.  Yum.

While I watered the little garden, my darlin man chopped 3 cloves of garlic and set it in oil in a skillet, and boiled pasta.  Under my shouted-from-the-garden direction he roughly chopped the greens, and put them in the pan.  I came inside (having emptied 15 gallons of good spring water into thirsty thirsty soil) and sauteed the greens until the stems began to get tender.  These went onto plates and two eggs went in the pan.  Over easy is the key here, so that when placed on top of greens and pasta, the yolk breaks and makes a lovely sauce.  Garnish with parmesean (or other hard cheese of your choosing) and salt and pepper.  Total time (minus water coming to the boil): 10 minutes, maybe.