I don’t want to say the P word, but I have to: Pandemic. I wish it was yesterday’s news, but no matter how hard I hope, Covid-19 and its ugly mutated-spawn variants remain relevant.  But people are only human; and that means that tourist season has started in San Diego.

Selling at a farmer’s market during tourist season means TALKING A LOT to all the visitors who have never heard of microgreens. It means, fielding questions about how microgreens are for eating and not planting. And I spend a lot of time explaining how you use them— raw and on top of your meal, or in places you’d use lettuce like a sandwich, or in places you’d use herbs. 

But every rule has exceptions: today we are bucking the rule about eating microgreens raw. Let’s bake some microgreens! 

A over a decade ago, I used to get scores of magazines. Martha Stewart Living, Food and Wine, Sunset, Vegetarian Times, Real Simple and Marth Stewart Cooking. Those things tend to pile up fast, so, I usually just tore out any recipes that looked enticing. Then I filed the recipes by category in a binder— I clearly had much more time on my hands that I do today. Now, I enjoy flipping through my old recipe journals for inspiration.

As I leafed through my recipe journal recently, my eyes fell one such torn out recipe, “Spinach Frittata with Green Salad” for One.  Like most of those torn out pages, I never actually made the recipe. All the sautéing, cooking down spinach and onions, squeezing them out, and finally baking them with eggs felt like a lot of work for one person to have one meal. I could just crack the eggs with spinach in the frying pan and be done, why bother with baking?

But, this time, it dawned on me all that precooking would be unnecessary if I just used chopped up microgreens instead of mature spinach. Microgreens are already so tender that they would probably cook up at the same rate as the eggs, and would not have too much moisture either. It totally worked.

The best thing about this recipe is that you can play around with microgreens varieties. I prefer brocoli and kale and aged cheddar, but I bet gouda, radish, and smoked salmon would be delicious. You can also easily scale up to making two or three at a time. They taste wonderful cold too. Do you have left over cooked veggies? Add them in too.

If you’ve got picky eaters, or are trying to eat more greens, this is an easy way to do it. Feel free to add even more microgreens. I’ve used an entire round tray of broccoli microgreens without sacrificing the egg flavor.

If you are making these to impress, keep in mind that they will deflate as they cool, so serve them as soon as you pull them from the oven.