Baked Eggs... in a Pepper!

How does that look? Pretty delicious, right?

It definitely looks 100x better than my first baked eggs attempt which involved very flat, dry eggs in ramekins, one of which had a sort of bizarre bubble like growth on it; I was saving that whole debacle for one of my kitchen disasters posts except that I never got around to it, so here you go:

Since a year or so has elapsed, I thought I'd get right back in there. I was partly inspired by my previously made Fancy Schmancy Springtime Eggs, a rare Pinterest attempt that worked pretty much like they said it would:

ANYWAYS... back to this weekend's brunch. I started with half a pepper, this sort of strange looking white bell pepper is some kind of Long Island pepper that I am entirely unable to find on the internet, but which exists in large piles at my produce stand. It is not quite as sweet as a red or yellow pepper but not as tart as green- you could use basically any pepper of your choice but colored yellow/orange/red would taste better.

As you can see, I lined the bottom with very thin slices of cheddar, which is optional. You could put almost anything in here- other cheese, (cooked) bacon, green onions, whatever!

I then carefully cracked 2 eggs into the pepper- from my disappointing ramekin experience, I learned that the eggs do puff very slightly, but not as much as you might expect. These eggs went basically to the very top, and it was fine.

You might notice that there is suddenly tinfoil in the picture- I used that to brace the pepper so it didn't roll and dump egg everywhere. I sprinkled the top with sea salt, pepper, rosemary, and parmesan cheese.

I cooked the eggs in a 400 degree oven- it really took a lot longer than I would have expected- about 35 minutes for the eggs to cook through. I would recommend checking the eggs frequently (just poke them- you want to be sure the white is set all the way through so that should be pretty firm). I don't like extremely runny yolks, so mine were a bit more on the done side.

Although it took a while to bake, this looked great- definitely brunch-worthy. In addition, it makes almost everyone happy- the vegetarians, the low carbers,  the paleos, the gluten frees- this, my friends, is a people pleaser. I think the vegans are out of luck, but that's about it. Give it a try!

I had it with some avocado, and a side of mango with lime (mmmmmmmmmm).