Quick Eggs

30 Apr

Eggs are indispensable in the kitchen; breakfast, lunch and dinner. An everyday, culinary backbone to so much cookery, but equally the crowning glory of so many family-favourite, crowd pleasing dishes. A quick dish of eggs (such as any of the recipes in this series) is the saving grace of so many hurried, happy mealtimes. I could not - would not - be without a box of 6 in my kitchen at all times.

I find eggs particularly irresistible as an ingredient because of their versatility, there’s not much they can’t do. Boiled whole with the top lopped off and the plump, tender yolk pierced with hot fingers of buttered toast, this is formative, ritualistic eating—from very young to the very old. Beaten and cooked as voluptuous curds for scrambled eggs, or cooked as an omelette, smooth and silky, either format serves as a very good meal, made in minutes. Frying an egg until the edges turn lacy like a fancy pair of knickers (yep, you read that right), with the white opaque and shiny like perspex, the yolk bulging and barely able to hold its form, simple yet iconic cookery.

Like a paint shop where tins of paint can blur in an imperceptible line up, seeping from one shade to another, for me, eggs encourage this same giddy confusion of colour and tone. Such pretty dainty things, speckled and freckled, brown, terracotta, taupe, fawn through to icy blue, ivory white and even a palest, creamiest almost-green, eggshells are nature’s marvel. But, let’s be honest, cracked is where the fun really starts and the cooking can begin in earnest.

I’ve written about eggs before, their durability in the kitchen is second to none and I use them often in many ways, sweet and savoury, even in cocktails sometimes! I don’t need to tell you how to boil or fry an egg, a kitchen basic if ever there was, but what I want for this series is to encourage you to cook with eggs with some newfound flare and perhaps shed new light on an egg based recipe or two, three, four, five and six that you may not have come across before or simply needed reminding of?

The caveat for this series being titled Quick Eggs, is a good one. I live in a family of five, 2 of whom steadfastly refuse to eat eggs, while the rest of us are partial to the odd egg based mealtime. With this in mind, I wanted to make this set of recipes very much speed and ease driven. Dishes to cook with the clock ticking, and with fellow egg fans in mind.