I had no idea it was THIS difficult to find a decent breakfast place in Tribeca. But thanks to Serious Eats I found Locanda Verde which perfectly was connected to the hotel that my sister was staying while she was in town. Though I thought I had found a new place to eat but she had already gone there for breakfast the day before. Ah oh well it was new to me.

There weren’t that many things I wanted to eat on the menu but finally decided on Uova Modenese poached eggs with cotechino hash, spinach, and tomato hollandaise. I didn’t know what “cotechino” was and wasn’t having high expectations. When the dish came I still wasn’t expecting much seeing how tiny the dish was, yes yes I eat a lot. It does look pretty though. With the fork I got a some eggs, spinach and sausages and ate it. !!!!!!!!! WOW!! The tomato hollandaise sauce was amazing! It was my first time having hollandaise sauce with tomatoes in them and I’m sure without them this would’ve just been a plain dish. I really wanted to eat slowly just to savor the moment and wished there was more bread.

- Locanda Verde 377 Greenwich St New York

After months of eating tough greens like collards and kale, spinach is in season. It requires much less cooking than those other greens, though it loses a lot more volume. Spinach is reportedly more nutritious raw than cooked, so maybe make yourself a salad with it — and that’s one way to make sure you don’t wilt it away to almost nothing.

For this week I wanted to eat fish and just so happens Jamie Oliver has a super simple recipe for fish pie. The recipe seems very flexible because he said you can use cheap fish or more fish or less fish or expensive fish maybe add some shrimps or maybe not. While watching the video, he does make it seem very quick and easy but I’m not very good at grating things. Maybe my grater sucks or it’s me but damn took me forever to grate everything. I also found it easier to mix not in the pan but in a bowl. I felt one side had more cheese than the other.

I ended up using catfish because those were the cheapest at my local fish shop. I bought a bag of spinach instead of baby spinach and did he say lemon? I think so. So after all the grating and chopping and mixing it was ready for the mashed potatoes to go on top. I was suppose to have enough mashed potatoes to cover the whole pan but I didn’t, it barely covered the pan with few pieces of spinach sticking out. Oh well can’t do nothing about it.

The results, Mo seem to like it a lot but I thought it needed a little bit more seasoning but overall it was pretty good. The written version of the recipe said to serve it with ketchup and thats what I did. I think that night I ate about 2 people’s worth of fish pie.

In my effort to clean out the fridge, I had to get creative with what I got. Actually I didn’t have to get too crazy since I had leftover stuff from making the pasta dish for Jamie Oliver’s Huntington 1000 and 2 week old spinach from my hot pot dinner and a tin of spam my friend, Phae, brought over. It’s basically the same recipe as the recipe I did for Huntington 1000 but instead of peas I used spinach. Also this time I didn’t use any oil or butter and added spam to it. I didn’t really add any salt to this since the spam is salty enough. In the end this was quick, easy and pretty good.