Rhymes with orange. Really!

Dear Jamie, I urgently need a quick and easy dinner recipe. The kids are gnawing at each other's ankles and CCD starts in 25 minutes! Whatever shall I do?? --Priscilla Procrastinator

Dear Priscilla, fret not! Spornge is your friend when a dinner deadline looms. You may be thinking, Spornge? spornge?? Is that a typo, Jamie Gladly? Has NaBloPoMo left your usually assiduous inner copy editor hogtied under her desk, squirming and grunting and trying to free herself?

Spornge is a recipe from the breakfast chapter of Whole Foods for the Whole Family. Both of the women who submitted it came from Wisconsin, so maybe it's a Wisconsin thing. The note in WFWF says it's pronounced "spornj," which totally rhymes with orange in my dialect. (How about yours? Do you say orange with one syllable or two?) You can't beat that, huh? Ultra-speedy and reasonably nutritious dinner and a solution to the age-old question of how to finish that love poem: "Your eyes so green / your hair so orange / you're never mean / you make great ____ ."

Spornge is perfect for those bare pantry days when you don't have enough eggs to scramble and you don't have enough bread for French toast. It's sort of a hybrid, with its own charms. Here's the basic recipe: Melt a generous knob of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. When it sizzles, add about three pieces of whole-grain bread, torn into pieces. Let the bread brown in the butter, and pour six beaten eggs on top. Turn the heat down to medium-low and scramble the eggs gently. Serve hot, with crumbled bacon on top if you like.

To adapt for dinner, whip out your grater while the bread is browning in the butter. Grate a pile of zucchini and summer squash first, and toss it in the pan when the bread is almost ready. Stir briefly before you add the eggs. While the eggs are doing their thing, grate a little pile of Parmesan cheese. Sprinkle it on top before serving and pass more at the table. It makes a grandma-approved dinner (vegetables, starch, and protein too) in one pan at the speed of lickety-split. And it's tasty, too, with those crispy buttery bits of bread and soft-set egg around their edges. I served this to the four youngest kids and myself for dinner and it worked out about right, so scale up if you're feeding a hungry horde.

Now close up that laptop, Priscilla P., and get whisking. CCD waits for no mom.

Comments

[Amy F]

Brilliant!

[RebeccaL]

Oh that sounds so yummy! May just have to make it this weekend. Thanks!

[Salome Ellen]

Gracious! You just nearly repeated my grandfather's recipe for "pappy stuff", otherwise known as what HIS dad cooked when mom wasn't home. Adding cubed leftover potatoes if available and/or starting with bacon grease are the differences. Who knew it was a real dish??!!!

[theresa]

Heh... not only do I say orange with two syllables, I say it with an "ar" sound, not an "or" sound, so it's that much further from rhyming with spornj. (Native of NYC, where there exist plenty of short a's and short o's before the letter r...)

[etteloc]

I'm from the Wisco and I've never heard of this. (But you can bet I'll try it.) We did eat something called slop time and again, and I had a friend whose family had a variation called goop. Both dishes could be whipped up in 15 minutes, but are pretty Campbell's soup/bean-heavy recipes.

Similarly, if you ever have pasta leftovers but not enough for everyone, crack some eggs into it and fry it up. Ditto for most rice dishes and those spoonfuls of veggies that just kind of accumulate.

I'll stop with the novella in your comments.

[Kyra]

We had your quasi-recipe for lunch yesterday, and may have it for dinner tonight due to my nerves feeling a little frail (four day illness for diabetic toddler, plus crib poop explosion at naptime which I'm just cleaning up now). Sigh.

[Celeste]

I mentioned this dish at my quilting gathering this weekend because it was so new to me. One mother said they made it as a toddler food and called it "egg bread", and another mother said it sounds like toad-in-the-hole, which I hadn't considered but which fits.

Anyway, INTERESTING. :o)