Adventures with poached eggs (part 2)

Part 1 is here

Oh yes you lucky people, you get to read more about the excitement that is poached eggs, "the most difficult of ALL eggs to cook. FACT." (so says the comment).

Today is the test of the second method for making poached eggs. I say method, but really it's no method at all. Put eggs in hot water (no typhoon this time) wait til they look cooked, take them out again.

So let's do it.

Here they are, two eggs in a pan. Yes, this is the selling point of method 2 - you can cook more than one egg at a time.

They're looking a bit foofy though aren't they? Don't you think? A little bit less cohesive than might be preferred?

Hey look, another picture that looks exactly the same. Sorry. The point was going to be that the eggs began to rise up in the pan.

Here is one on the way out of the pan

 And here they are looking pretty on the plate. Not too bad eh?

Method #2
Pros

• You can cook more than one at a time
• You get an edible egg (or two)

Cons

• Much more egg left in the pan, where the white decided to go all airy-fairy
• Actually is that even a con?
• Better yolk: white ratio

In conclusion - do it like this, the typhoon is fun but I am hungrier than 1-egg-at-a-time.

Hangover

I was going to write something today. It may even have been poached eggs part 2. But instead I am sitting on the sofa in pain (a smaller amount of pain than earlier, but still some pain).

Am I getting old? Or is it just that I have gotten used to a better quality of booze?

I'd like to blame the cheap wine drunk in a field by a river, and the even cheaper lager than followed it.

I am too old for this shit. From now on I must imbibe only high-quality beverages.
I need gin and tonics and locally-sourced ale and perhaps some champagne. Actually I am not a champagne snob, cava or prosecco or nice English or New Zealand sparkling is fine too. This is very nice, although if you offered me a nicely-chilled glass of it right now I might have to say no.

Yes, that's definitely more like it.



So... hangover cures. No raw eggs here, and no magic, what you need is a good dose of each of the following:

• water (or any liquid)
• caffeine
• salt
• sugar
• painkillers (this won't cure anything, it'll just make life more bearable while the other ingredients do their work)

In the meantime, think pleasant thoughts - this can be aided by a look at the lovely website Tea and Kittens.

Aaaah.

Adventures with poached eggs

Finding myself with more time than usual to have breakfast this morning I decided to do something a little more exciting. Not exciting in a strict culinary manner, but something with a sense of danger.

I decided to make a poached egg.

This may not sounds dangerous to you, but think for a second. You are boiling an egg without the shell. There's nothing to keep it together. You could just end up with slightly eggy water. That wouldn't be very tasty. It'd be a pain to clean up too.

So here we go. Living life on the edge. Making a poached egg. Rock and roll.

There is conflicting advice on how to go about this, but one of the stop suggestions is to get the water to nearly-boiling and stir it very very fast until you have a vortex of water that will keep the egg in the middle.

Oh no! It's going all over the place! The vortex is not pulling the egg into the centre but instead spreading it everywhere.

But wait... the egg slowly brings itself together. I'm not sure this is anything to do with the swirling water or if eggs just have special egg-magnetic properties.

Here it is. Sorry for the blurriness, that'll be steam. It actually looks like a poached egg! Success!

So in conclusion, swirly stirry water method.

• Pros:
• you get an egg to eat
• it looks like a poached egg

• Cons:
• the FEAR
• only one egg per pan, could get tiresome

Mmm, yellow

This is why you are fat (me, not you)

When I am 40 and I ask myself why I am not as slim as I was at 20, I don't want any platitudes about ageing and how it's natural to change shape.

I want you to say "prawn crackers".

I believe that the discovery that you can make your own prawn crackers will turn out to have been a turning point in my life.

I love prawn crackers you see. They used to be rare, coming with chinese takeaway, to be eaten once you are stuffed full of other food. They are so full of air they practically dissolve in the mouth, while stil being crunchy and savoury and mmmmmmmm. The fact that each of those little pockets of air comes with a thin coating of oil can be ignored.

But now, now prawn crackers are an every day occurrence. Well, not every every day (although I wouldn't complain), but everyday as in common, not special, just-have-a-few-while-dinner-is-cooking. Because I can make them myself. They've always been available pre-cooked at exortionate prices from Sharwoods or Blue Dragon or similar, but those dry imitations just don't have the same appeal as a fresh tasty prawn cracker that has recently been submerged in smoking-hot oil. Admittedly they don't have quite the same effect on your kitchen walls either, but all pleasure comes at a cost.

I must admit that when I say I "make" prawn crackers, what I mean is that I go to the Chinese supermarket (I happen to live in the "most ethnically diverse area" of a really unethnically diverse city), buy strange solid translucent discs, and throw them into hot oil. A deep fat fryer would be great for this, and a friend recently held a let's-fry-everything party to celebrate the purchase of a deep fat fryer, but all you really need is a wok or small saucepan with a couple of centimetres of oil, and song tongs to fish out the crackers as they puff and spin and expand. It is a thing of beauty, truly. The Crackers expanding, not the pan that I keep specially for making them. The pan is a mess! But the crackers expand and twist and spin and puff up and turn inside out like a flower blossoming or those girls who dance with ribbons. (OK, so neither of those turns inside out, but if they did it would still be beautiful)

So there, my ode to prawn crackers. They are tasty, quick to make, and they will (probably) make me fat.

For a healthier you-can-make-it-yourself snack try edamame (and if you want to know more about the pleasures and dangers of edamame click here). You can buy them frozen in-the-pod at the above-mentioned Chinese supermarkets, and they just need boiling and sprinkling with salt. They're more expensive than prawn crackers, but they come with an aura of virtue that no greasy fried thing can ever achieve.