Lonely Little Petunia sandwiches

by June

It's a lonely-little-petunia day around here. The sun is peeking through the clouds, but Birch is away. To cheer ourselves, we made our favorite summer-day lunch: Deborah Madison's Fried Eggs with Sizzling Vinegar (from a gardener's and market-goer's must-have cookbook, Local Flavors). We always make the fried egg into a sandwich and somehow got started calling it the Lonely Little Petunia.

Here's how we do it (and you can too):

We fry an egg in butter, then shuffle it to a slice of Birch's country Italian loaf.

Next, we add two teaspoons of butter to the frying pan. When it bubbles, we toss in minced shallots. (Today we used baby leeks, yummmm.)

Next comes a quick swirl of red-wine vinegar or homemade tarragon vinegar, about a tablespoon.

This sizzling sauce gets poured right onto the egg.

To serve ourselves, we piled on pea shoots and Tom Thumb lettuce. Fern looked at it in satisfaction, and proclaimed, "It's all our own!" And so it was, with many thanks to Birch for baking and the hens for laying and the greens for loving the rain.