Eggs For Breakfast

Well I haven't written anything for months (for reasons that are far too boring to go into), but I am SO pleased with myself for the breakfast I just served up for the German and his sister that I have had to write about it immediately. 

Background information: every Saturday and Sunday we've been together, somewhere between the hours of 10:00 and 14:00, the German and I eat a cooked breakfast.  Traditionally it has consisted of eggs, bacon and beans, but since, however, at the start of this year we decided it might be wise to cut down on our bacon intake, we've narrowed it down to just the scrambled eggs and beans.  Scrambled eggs (butter/milk/salt/pepper/heat very slowly, stir infrequently and don't break the yolks till the last minute) and beans (Heinz Heinz Heinz) are a highly underrated breakfast, it must be said, but one that does start to get a bit boring when you've had it seven weekends in a row - even when they have parsley on (which you should definitely do: it turns the scrambled eggs and beans into a bewilderingly new and exciting plate of food).  Thus last weekend I decided it was the dawn of a new breakfast era and got all creative on my eggs.  On the Sunday I baked them, breaking each one into a separate ramekin, covering it with a thin layer of cream, sticking it in an oven dish of hot water (enough to go about half way up the side of the ramekin) and cooking it for about 15 minutes on gas mark 6ish.  It wasn't half bad but far, far too rich for either of us and definitely a bit much for a Sunday morning.

And so to this morning. WELL (she says, all puffed up with pride).  I'm not sure I've ever eaten eggs benedict before, and until I ate it just now I was pretty certain that I didn't like Hollandaise sauce either, but  for some reason I woke up this morning and decided that was the way the eggs were going today.  After a quick trip to the supermarket and to our trusty local shop, I halved and toasted some English muffins, layered some good Wiltshire ham on them, topped it with a poached egg and covered it all with a generous two spoons of homemade Hollandaise sauce.  Quite ambitious with even the mildest of hangovers, it has to be said, but it considerably easier than I thought it would be - and it totally impressed both me and the Germans.

To poach the eggs (which I hasten to add I have never done with success before) I brought about an inch of water close to a simmer - so that one or two tiny bubbles had floated to the surface but there was no real movement - in a fairly deep skillet.  Three at a time (I was doing six, and three fitted in with plenty of room to spare around them) I broke the eggs in as close to the water as I could get and then let them plop gently in (sorry, I sound a bit like Nigel Slater).  Then I turned off the heat completely and let them sit happily in the hot water till they looked ready - a highly specific instruction for which I apologise, but I suppose it was 3... or 4... or 5 minutes.

For the Hollandaise sauce I adapted a recipe I found somewhere on this internet.  I whisked 4 medium-sized egg yolks in a bowl and add to them just over a tablespoon of lemon juice, a pinch of salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper.  Next off, I added 2 tablespoons of cold water to 8oz of warm, melted butter and then very, very, very slowly whisked it into the eggs before putting it back in the pan and onto an incredibly low heat, whisking all the time till it was nice and thick.

Trying to coordinate things was for reasons unknown to me not the utter disaster it should have been: I started on the Hollandaise first, then halved the muffins and toasted them before topping them with the ham.  I then went on to poaching eggs whilst I slowly heated the Hollandaise and hey presto, somehow it was all done to perfection (if I do say so myself) and out in the very sunshiney garden with a pot of tea, an enormous fruit salad and the Saturday papers before any of us could say "Apparently it's going to snow next week".