Last night my wife went into the kitchen to make her delicious tuna/potato salad/bulgur wheat lunchtime combo for the working week only to find this in the fridge:
Tag Archives: eggs
Deconstructed Fish Pie
I was watching ‘Masterchef, The Professionals, The Best Bits’ (they really do love dragging the maximum televisual delight out of food programmes don’t they) and there was a discussion about ‘food smears’.
Chef Michel Roux Jr (the skeletal Michelin star chef who obviously has eating issues and mad staring eyes) made an unsavoury (sic) comparison between one poor cook’s chocolate-smeared plate and something else which I won’t mention because I’m British.
However he was making a serious point about presentation. And all this about 10 mins before I was going to hit the pots and pans and make a fish pie. Fish pies are nice enough to eat but from a visual perspective can be a bit bland I think – the contents often end up looking like the insides of the android ‘Ash’ played by Ian Holm in Alien.
With that pleasant analogy in mind I decided to create a fish pie which didn’t deteriorate into a homgeneous gloop once cooked.
Bowie is everywhere these days…
And that required the construction of a Deconstructed Fish Pie! The ingredients are the same as for a a standard fish pie – the difference is in the…well there isn’t any really but anyway…
Deconstructing Breakfast
Over here, on this funny wind-swept island (which incidentally is close to half the size of California yet contains almost twice as many people) we know a thing or two about breakfast.
Now of course the British used to ‘Go to Work on an Egg’! but nowadays it’s more likely to be a bowl of muesli with maybe a bit of organic yoghurt. Perhaps one of those green smoothies (what’s in those?)
However there is still a hardcore of Englishmen and women who yearn for the good old days, when life was less complex, cholesterol hadn’t been invented yet and bacon still had an inch of fat and the rind on.
Yes this group still enjoys a good old-fashioned fry up. But its unpopular. Its full of fat. It’s bad.
So how do you get round this conundrum; on the one hand you want the salty greasiness to fuel your day, on the other you want the approval of your peers (or nutritionist).
A standard English Cooked Breakfast
Foolproofed Poached Egg Methodology
I think poaching is the most impressive way to cook an egg . There are many ways to do it – use a poacher, cooking rings, or just put them in water ‘free-form’.
But the problem with these methods is that either the eggs end up looking flat and a bit boring or they try to disintegrate in the water, looking like they’ve blown up. What you want with a poached egg is something that looks like a little white cloud!
Of course I didn’t make a poached egg and then just eat it. I serve it with steak!
Dauphinoise Potatoes
Every now and then you see a fellow blogger’s creation that takes your fancy. Rather than leave a comment ‘I want to make that’ and then immediately forget about it, you just go ahead and make it. Now such a thing happened when I found this recipe for Dauphinoise potatoes by the Greedy Frog. I found it via another blog but I can’t remember which one, yes I can it’s at 5 Kinds of Rice
Anyway the key thing with the recipe is that, contrary to popular belief, there is no room for cheese. Unfortunately I couldn’t deal with that revelation so I shoved a load of cheese in mine.
