Jeff Gordinier: Sunshine Eggs, Russet Potatoes, and Peruvian Aji Amarillo Sauce

Author and editor Jeff Gordinier shares a family lEGG-acy breakfast dish that celebrates the divine romantic chemistry between eggs and potatoes.

Please meet Jeff Gordinier, California native and author of X Saves the World and Hungry: Eating, Road-tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World. Jeff is Esquire’s Food and Drinks editor and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, among other publications. While he rubs elbows with some of the world’s greatest chefs and stands in the center of food culture, his passion for food started right in his parents’ kitchen, where he still returns to create the egg dishes his family relishes, especially non-fussy Sunshine Eggs, with “deliciousness and hue that will lift your spirits.”

I grew up in an egg family. For whatever reasons, having to do with metabolism, tradition, or long-forgotten French ancestry, my fellow Gordiniers and I do not wake each morning craving bran muffins or granola. (I had a brief fling with millet, but it didn’t stick.) We eat eggs. Daily. Religiously. We felt vindicated when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently capitulated to common sense and declared eggs a “healthy” thing to eat. However, we are less thrilled about how much we’re paying for a dozen.

My mother and father live in Laguna Beach, California. They are 82- and 83-years-old, respectively. When my wife and I drive south from Los Angeles to visit them with our 6-year-old twins — and perhaps with one or both of my older children, who are 19 and 22 — we anticipate morning gridlock around the kitchen stove. Eggs will be cooked in a variety of ways, and we’ve learned to wait our turn. My father might fry up a couple, over easy, or make an omelet; either way, he’ll go ham with the hot sauce. My mother might scramble some eggs for herself and crank out homemade Egg McMuffins for the kids. (Double-toast the English muffins, and lavishly butter both halves. Prosciutto is way better than Canadian bacon, but there’s no shame in American cheese.) I wait and watch. Everything I know about cooking eggs I learned from thousands of hours of observing my parents — as well as one Jedi-level training session with Jacques Pépin at his home kitchen in Connecticut in 2011.

I like to go last. I wait for everyone else in the family to fix breakfast, and then I gingerly step up to the stove. Lately, I’ve been going back to something I call Sunshine Eggs. It’s a sloppy mess, but I’m still obsessively precise about how I cook it, so it’s best if I do so alone. I call it Sunshine Eggs because the yellow of the egg yolks merges with the yellow of the Peruvian aji amarillo sauce, giving the dish a kind of summertime brightness. (Peru has a vast universe of salsas, as I have learned from my friend JuanMa Calderón, the chef behind the great Peruvian restaurants Celeste and La Royal in the Boston area.)

My family also believes in the divine romantic chemistry between eggs and potatoes; I inherited this article of faith. With Sunshine Eggs, the potatoes and the eggs are not forced to occupy separate areas of the plate. Go ahead and scramble them together. They consummate their love for each other, and everybody wins. There’s plenty of flavor from the garlic and the chives, and a bountiful spattering of the Peruvian hot sauce gives the dish an undercurrent of spiciness that we Californians can’t seem to live without. Just as potatoes and eggs are meant to be partners, I find that my morning coffee tastes a little bit better if my breakfast manages to incorporate the zing of salsa.

The other day, in Laguna Beach, I watched my father blanketing an omelet with salsa verde. He grew up on the Jersey Shore, but we moved to Southern California in 1978, and it didn’t take long for him to adopt the local customs. “Now,” he told me, “I can’t imagine having breakfast without salsa.” Meanwhile, my father watched me peeling a leftover baked russet for Sunshine Eggs; he asked me what I was doing. “I always save an extra baked potato for breakfast the next day,” I told him. “I do the same thing,” he said.

Ingredients:

• A baked russet potato

• Olive oil

• Kosher salt

• Two eggs

• A clove of minced garlic

• A fistful of chives, chopped

• Aji Amarillo sauce

• Sour cream

Directions:

During the preceding evening, if you happen to be baking russet potatoes for dinner, bake an extra one. (One hour at 400 degrees works for me if the potatoes are medium-sized.) Leave the extra one in the refrigerator overnight. (Doing this seems to loosen the skin surrounding the potato.)

The next morning, peel the skin off the potato. (Yes, I love potato skins. But for some reason, I find that the leftover spud crisps up better in a pan without the skin — the jagged exposed rockfaces of the tuber soak up a little olive oil and turn golden brown.) Slice the potato into rough chunks, or just use your fingers. Symmetry is not the objective. You want both small and large chunks. (You can also use half a russet potato if a whole one seems too much.)

Heat a non-stick pan with a generous amount of olive oil — a bit of a pool, even. Leave the heat on medium-low. Drop the potato chunks into the hot oil. Turn them occasionally with a wooden spoon. Watch for their surfaces to get golden. Be careful not to let them burn.

Meanwhile, your mise en place is standing by: You have (1) one ramekin with a minced garlic clove, (2) another ramekin with chopped chives, (3) a bowl with two whisked eggs, seasoned with a pinch of salt and ready for scrambling, (4) a spoon and a jar of aji amarillo sauce.

Now this part needs to go fast so that you don’t burn the garlic.

Dump the minced garlic into the pan with the potatoes and spin it around very fast with a wooden spoon. Then pour in the whisked eggs. Then the chives. Then splash in two or three or even four generous spoonfuls of the Peruvian sauce. Boom, boom, boom, boom. (The sauce is a bit spicy, yes, but the other ingredients in this mess tend to counteract the heat, so don’t hold back. That Peruvian chili pepper is the star attraction here.)

Scramble everything together quickly, folding and flipping so that the ingredients mix.

Slide that into a bowl. Add a spoonful of sour cream on the side as a condiment.

It will not necessarily look pretty — this is not a classic French omelet, after all — but its deliciousness and its hue will lift your spirits.