Whisk Wednesdays: Oeufs Mollets Florentine (Soft Boiled Eggs with Spinach and Mornay Sauce)

      The recipe prepared for this week is from Class 18,  Les Grillades et les Gratins (Grilling and Browning) and is Oeufs Mollets Florentine (Soft Boiled Eggs with Spinach and Mornay Sauce).  It can be found in the cookbook Le Cordon Bleu At Home on pages 68-70. 

      When I saw this recipe, I thought...hmmm...may have to be a rewind week for me as I can't see the guys eating runny eggs and cooked spinach.  They like eggs fine...cooked completely...and they like spinach fine...not cooked at all.  However, once again, the indefatigable Melissa, our current newbie, got on the ball Saturday and cooked up her weekly assignment, proceeding to gush all about it on the Whisk insider's email, and, before you would even imagine, I am lining up ingredients to make this dish. 

      And, how did it taste?  Wonderful!  I would do it again in a heartbeat as Mark raved about it, and it turns out, he informed me he DOES like runny eggs, he just never bothered to tell me that in 30 years because he knew I did not care for them.  What a guy! 

      Let me say that this is a recipe for which you want to line up all the ingredients, a la Shari's style, before you begin, because things go pretty quickly from that point on.   

      I did make one minor change...no one here was going to eat spinach cooked and then cooked again and then cooked again...three times cooking spinach was just not happening.  I wilted it barely in the saute pan with just a tiny bit of butter and salt and pepper.  It was perfect for us this way. 

      Pan count:  one for wilting the spinach (done the recipe way would have also resulted in another pan), one for boiling the eggs, one for making the mornay sauce (I used a double boiler as I don't trust myself with sauces right on the flame yet, and the double boiler ensures that I can wash up as I go, which I like to do, since I don't have to keep stirring that sauce non-stop for ten minutes), and then the little individual dishes I used to assemble it all before placing it under the broiler, so I guess that makes 4 or so.  The French do love their pots and pans.    

      So, while I was going to pass this week on this recipe and make a rewind instead, I'm so happy Melissa convinced me otherwise...delicious recipe...and now I can use my rewind pass in a couple weeks when we are back to VEAL again...I'm done with the veal...it's either going to be chicken or rewind that week for us.  I just can't get past those sweet little baby calf faces with veal.

      If you would like to see how the other Whisk Wednesday members fared in this class, click here, and then on the Whisk Wednesdays connect to individual bloggers, or better yet, come and join us!  Shari has the ingredients posted on her site at the click, so while we can't post the recipe instructions, you can at least look at the ingredients, and I bet you can figure out a lot of it from there. 

Upcoming schedule: 
Class 19 Pocher (Poaching)

• Class 19, Part 1 (Post on Wednesday, December 3, 2008):
Blogger choice: Saumon au Champagne (Salmon in Champagne Sauce) on page 486 OR Petite marmite Henri IV (Chicken pot-au-feu) on page 246 in Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cook Home Collection