Burke and Wells wrote a while back about their best scrambled eggs, the way they describe it sounds amazing. On Monday after climbing I made pretty great scrambled eggs. Taking my inspiration from Burke and Wells, but bearing in mind that Lucy and I were starving from a few hours climbing.
Take decent free range eggs, supermarket or farmer's market or even duck eggs (yum). Allow about 2 per person, melt some unsalted butter with a little olive oil so that it doesn't burn. Whisk your eggs with coarse ground pepper and some salt, then turn the pan down as low as it will go, then gently scramble your eggs, stir and scrape as you go, it'll take 5-10 minutes. They end up delightfully creamy and taste a million miles away from eggs done in a hot pan. Best on toast, with long espresso and some fresh juice....
Burke and Wells, along with Stewart Brand are completely right, life is taken at too fast a pace, onions know this and respond to gentle treatment.
recipe: May 2003 Archives
Lucy wanted muffins for breakfast, but not nasty shop bought ones. She wanted savoury muffins with bacon. Several dozen recipe books later, the elusive recipe for the right kind of muffin was no where to be found, I turned to google and found ... muffins. The article describes a bit of the history of muffins, the differences between US and UK and gives several recipes.
I've amended the recipe a bit, adding bacon and sundried tomato, but it is largely based on the spicy muffin recipe linked from the above article.
Savoury muffins
makes about 10 - 12 muffins
100g polenta, use the coarse stuff for a bit of crunch
75g plain flour
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp baking powder
2 large eggs
75g butter, melted
150g soured cream, crème fraîche or Greek yoghurt
4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
50g of cheddar, a good strong one like vintage canadian
5-10 halves of sundried tomato
Turn the oven to 190C/gas mark 5/375F. Take a 12 hole muffin or tart tin and butter it, so as things don't stick. In bowl large enough for the eggs, butter and cream, melt the butter and leave to cool. Now grill the bacon and leave to cool. Then sieve the first five ingredients into a large separate bowl, this needs to be big enough to hold everything. Now crack the two eggs into the cooled butter and add the cream (or yoghurt). Stir this until the eggs are mixed through. Snip the bacon and sundried tomato into small strips and grate the cheese. Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ones and add the bacon, tomato and half the cheese. Now stir until just mixed, you are aiming for no dry patches of flour, but not over mixed. Spoon into the tray and bake for around 15 to 20 minutes. About halfway sprinkle the rest of the cheese over the top of the muffins. They are done when a knife blade comes out clean, they'll start to go golden too.
You can vary this quite a lot, add toasted pine nuts or pumpkin seeds, maybe even small bits of rehydrated porcini, or olives etc.
