Starting out

First an apology, there are no photos sorry.

The Starter course caused me all kinds of hassle. Plan A was going to be Heston Blumenthal's individual scampi fry from his seafood feast. A shortage of scampi/langoustines/dublin bay prawns put paid to that. Never mind on to plan B, Scrambled Ostrich egg. A cold snap prevented the Ostriches from laying, so that was the end of that one. Time for plan C. After doing some digging I found eggs & ham on the 2nd class breakfast menu.  I teamed it with fried potatoes, did my own honey glazed ham & went with Quails eggs. Originally I planned to fry the Quails eggs & serve 2 per person. However getting them out of the shells quickly & intact proved to be more of a challenge than I could manage, so I scrambled them.

There we go a starter of fried potato, honey glazed ham & scrambled quail's eggs. It was a small plate, I didn't want to over face the dinners after all

Poached duck eggs

I do like poached duck eggs, I finally got enough time together to have a stab at doing them sat bains style

First off I needed a water bath, this is my ersatz set up.

Thats a large pan of water, my meat thermometer and the smallest ring on my gas hob on it's lowest setting heating maybe a third of the pan's base. This kept everything at a fairly even 58-60c.

The eggs went in & I spent the next couple of hours stopping the water from heating too much or cooling down excessively. In between worrying about that I fretted about how I was going to get the eggs out of their shells (Yup you poach them in the shell, I assume it doesn't count as boiling, because you get nowhere near 100c). Turns out they come out of the shell quite easily if you can bring yourself to give the shell enough of a tap against the pan edge.

I served them on hot buttered toast, because it was a "quick" lunch rather than anything fancy & because I was all out of pata-negra ham.

Was it worth it ? I think so, with a proper water bath it's definitely worth while, the yolk ends up really rich. I think next time (and there will be a next time)  I'll let them go for a bit longer and I'll keep the temperature more to the higher end.

Enjoy, I know I did.

Duck egg

When I started using the farm shop, I noticed a larger than usual range of eggs. I'd heard a lot about how great Duck eggs are for breakfast so bought some. After scrambling , frying & omeletting I tried poaching. That's now my favourite way to eat them.  I absolutely had to try the ham, egg & peas at Sat Bains. Sat poaches his eggs in a water bath at around 60c for some hours, I'll be trying that on my next free weekend. Meanwhile I went for the traditional method (ish).

Here's how I normally poach a duck egg

Bring a pan of water to a rolling boil & add in a teaspoon of vinegar. Drop the egg (still in its shell) into the water for about 20 seconds. Fish it out with a slotted spoon and then crack it into the water. You should end up with a mostly egg shaped blob around the yolk & a bit of a tail/veil of white, with some breakaway bits floating about on the surface. I like my yolks soft so about 90s-2mins does the trick. Scoop out with the trusty slotted spoon, set on hot buttered toast and add maybe a twist of black pepper.