Benedictine Breakfast
March 5th, 2007 at 2:00 pm (Physical)
I love to make a big breakfast every Saturday morning for me and my boyfriend, the Record Store Romeo. He’s vegetarian and, on top of everything else, he can’t eat sugar or he gets terrible migraines. That means that many of my favorite breakfast options — pancakes, bacon, muffins, waffles, sausage biscuits — are out. I generally make something egg-y. Omelettes, breakfast burritos with veggie sausage, and veggie scrambles have featured prominently in recent days, and are generally paired with a light version of country potatoes (we like a mix of red potatoes and sweet potatoes) and a fruit smoothie made with chopped and frozen fruits.
This weekend, though, I was wanting to mix things up a bit. I had been craving eggs benedict but, never having been a fan of ham, I thought I’d do a veggie version. This would require, however, the dreaded combo of poaching eggs and making a hollandaise sauce — both of which I have heard horror stories about.
Of course I did my research and found all sorts of tips for accomplishing what should be a simple task — dropping an egg into boiling water and having it cook. Unfortunately, unless you want egg drop soup you need some technique.
This entry over at Chocolate and Zucchini contains comments which pretty much summarize what I read during my internet research on poaching. In the end, it took me 5 attempts to create the perfect, perfect poached egg. That was great, since I had 2, RSR had 2, and the dog got the ugly, broken one.
In the end, I used vinegar in the water and the “tornado/vortex” method and came out with a pretty sweet poach.
The Veggie Benedicts were then assembled with 100% whole wheat english muffins, a slab of heirloom tomato, two generous slices of ripe avocado, the egg, and a dribble of hollandaise sauce (made from a mix this time, but from scratch next time since I have now mastered the poaching). Topped it off with fresh ground pepper. Ate. Drooled. Moaned.
It was wonderful (and clocked in with a grand total of less than 10 points).
