Recently, I learned a lovely Italian term that has special meaning for our family: Cucina Povera.
Cucina Povera can mean “poor kitchen” or “poor cuisine”—peasant food, in other words.
I’ve long been enamored with peasant food, particularly since it makes a virtue of necessity.

The cookbook at the heart of it all (Image: Amazon.com).
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We closed our Christmas season yesterday, but one aspect of it lingers: pickling marinades.
Pickled vegetables comprise the majority of our stocking stuffers each year. We love pickled peppers, and Michelle and Aly enjoy stuffed olives. We eat these throughout the holiday season, so by the end of the celebration, we have a lot of jars sitting around without contents, other than the leftover marinades.
We, like many frugal people, sometimes put new foods into these marinades. Boiled eggs if they can fit, or small onions—or in our case, any small produce, like little carrots from bed culling. Leave them in there for a while, and they “pickle” in the juice.
More and more often, Michelle has taken to poaching eggs in the marinades for breakfast.

A pickling marinade-poached egg on a bed of sauteed vegetables (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
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