British Breakfast
ANGLESEY EGGS
INGREDIENTS – POTATOES
1½ pounds russet, Yukon gold, or King Edward potatoes
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon salt
2 large leeks
3 tablespoons butter (2 tablespoons more later)
½ tablespoon butter (1½ tablespoons more later)
1¼ cups milk
6 hard boiled eggs
* = Caerphilly can be difficult to find and be expensive to buy online.
INGREDIENTS – SAUCE & TOPPING
1½ tablespoons butter
5 teaspoons flour
1 cup milk
¼ cup breadcrumbs
½ cup grated, or crumbled, Caerphilly* cheese or Cheddar cheese (½ cup more later)
½ cup grated, or crumbled, Caerphilly cheese or Cheddar cheese
SPECIAL UTENSIL
9″ casserole dish
Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 20 minutes.
PREPARATION – POTATOES
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Peel potatoes. Cut each potato into eight pieces. Put potato pieces into large pot. Add enough water to cover potato bits. Bring water to boil on high heat. Reduce heat to low-medium and simmer for 20 minutes or until potato is tender. Drain potatoes. Add pepper and salt. Mash potatoes with potato masher.
While potatoes boil, remove stringy root end of the leeks. Remove the dark green tops. Wash leeks. (Dirt can get between the leek layers.) Slice leeks into circles ¼” thick..Add 3 tablespoons butter and sliced leeks. Sauté for 12 minutes at medium heat or until leek slices soften.
Coat casserole dish with ½ tablespoon butter. Add leek circles and mashed potatoes to large mixing bowl. Mix with large spoon until well blended. Add leek circles/mashed potatoes to casserole dish. Smooth with spatula. Boil eggs. (6 minutes for soft-boiled and 12 minutes for hard-boiled.) Peel and cut eggs in half. Arrange egg halves evenly over mashed potatoes. Press eggs gently into the top of potato mix.
PREPARATION – SAUCE & TOPPING
While eggs boil, add 1½ tablespoons butter to pot. Melt butter using low heat. Add flour. Mix with spatula until well blended. Cook for 2 minutes at medium heat. Stir frequently. Add milk. Mix with spatula until well blended. Cook for 3 minutes at medium heat or until sauce thickens. Stir constantly. Add ½ cup cheese. Cook for 1 minute at medium heat or until cheese melts. Stir frequently. Ladle sauce over mashed potatoes and egg halves.
Add bread crumbs and ½ cup cheese to small mixing bowl. Mix with whisk or fork until well blended. Sprinkle bread crumb/cheese mix over sauce. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden brown and crispy.
TIDBITS
1) How many times has this happened to you? You’ve made scrambled eggs just before the start of the seventh game of the World Series. You made a lot. You get ready to clean the pan.
2) But your friends in the den yell, “The game’s started.” As you head to the TV, you tell yourself that you’ll scrub off the eggs bits from the pan when there’s a lull in the ball game.
3) But there is never is lull in the action. In fact you are watching the most exciting baseball game ever, and in the game of the World Series! And between the Mariners and the Pirates. They had gone decade after decade without appearing in baseball’s fall classic.
4) It’s the sixth inning. Barney Bubble and Louis Courgette are both throwing perfect games. How exciting is that? But in the back of your culinary mind, you sense the eggs in the frying pan petrifying into rock. You sense a cup has fallen into the mixing bowl used for whisking the eggs. You feel the egg remnants in the mixing bowl cementing the cup to the bowl in a bond so strong that it will last until the Sun becomes a red giant and incinerates the Earth.
5) “Why, oh why?” you think, “didn’t I make Anglesey Eggs for everyone. It’s ever so tasty and it leaves no egg glue.”
6) Your synapses fire an existential thought. “Why didn’t I tell my wife to make us sandwiches?” But you knew why not. She tried to kill you the last time you tried this stunt. An all-woman jury acquitted her.
7) 22 innings later, the Mariners win. A walk-home run ends it; it’ provides the only man on base. But there is no joy in your kitchen. That pan will never scrub clean. In fact, a rhino’s become fossilized in the egg strata that lies between the cup and the mixing bowl.
8) How the rhino get into your kitchen without anyone noticing? Perhaps it tiptoed? How did it get between the cup and the mixing bowl? Perhaps it was on a diet.
9) So plan your meals wisely.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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