The egg

This must go down in my 11 Things in 2011 under Cooking! 

Today I achieved a beautiful (not perfect) poached egg.

I usually only eat hard boiled eggs, as I hate the runny yolk sticking to your teeth and mouth (like peanut butter) and god forbid if there is uncooked white!! So hard boiled eggs are safest.

But I have been coming round to the poached egg firmly cooked. I don't have an egg poacher (probably easier) but it has been a long search to get it right.

Lynne and Andrew showed me how they do it. 

Boil the water and when it is boiling, swirl it around and then lower (from a dish) the egg. The swirling water wraps the white around the yolk and you get a compact egg.

 Sounds easy? Well as is my wont I adapted this. 

My cooking style is 'variation on a theme". 

That is, I read a recipe and get the general idea, then adapt it to what I have in the kitchen. This technique arose when I was learning to cook in Halls Creek .We had very little variety of igredients so it was beef and beef in a variety of forms. So we would scour the Women's Weekly Cook Book and adapt the recipe using beef and probably omit some of the spices mentioned as well .

This style continues to this day, but I do use spices!.

Back to the egg. The first thing I did was ignore the advice to put the egg on a saucer and slide it in. The result of breaking it in meant the egg splashed into the water and bits of white splashed about.

It was edible but messy.

The next time when the water was swirling it didn't seem to be gathering in the white so I decided to swirl it a bit more. Result? Disaster, and I had to throw it all out. White / grey water with little bit of egg diffused all through it.

Other times I had the water too hot (if it was low it took too long!!  3 minutes .I mean how long can you watch a pot!) and subsequently as I put the egg in the boiling  slowed down (the cold egg hitting the water) and when I turned away it started boiling again, and what results is white foaming on top  (or over the top: I have done this several times) of the water and the yolk somewhere in the midst.

But today I kept it on simmer, slid the egg in, waited patiently(actually I cooked a piece of toast and put the dishes away) and the result was perfect in my eyes.

My breakfast egg.

A tidy white, a soft but not runny yolk and with a little ground pepper and a slice of bakers Delight Cape Seed loaf,  a perfect breakfast for my day off.