Breakfast Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Breakfast

02
May
2019

Name Plates: Eggs Benedict

categories: Breakfast, Brunch, Classic Recipes, Eggs, Name Plates, United States of America

Hello brunch! Eggs Benedict is one of my favourite brunch dishes. Mind you, I would also eat them for breakfast, lunch or dinner. I’m not that fussy! But today’s project is to uncover the eponymous Benedict,

What Are Eggs Benedict?

Okay, so…given this is such a brunch favourite, I know many of you will already know exactly what Eggs Benedict entails. And all of you are quite welcome to skip to the next section.

For those who are in the dark, Eggs Benedict is a dish typically served at breakfast or brunch which consists of two halves of a toasted English muffin, topped with bacon or ham, a poached egg and Hollandaise Sauce.

Who Was Benedict?

Larousse names Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans as one of the possible birthplaces of Eggs Benedict. And there is certainly an amazing looking Eggs Benny on their website.😍 However, all the other research I have done points to New York as being the birthplace of Eggs Benedict.

Delmonico’s in New York is a contender. A regular customer, one of the Le Grand Benedict family, got bored with the regular breakfast and asked for “poached eggs on toasted English muffins with a thin slice of ham, Hollandaise sauce and a truffle on top” as a more exciting alternative.

In 1967, a letter to the New Yorker said that Commodore E.C.Benedict, a yachtsman and retired banker was the inventor of Eggs Benedict.

My favourite story, however, and so the one we are going to go with, suggests that the recipe was devised by one Lemuel Benedict in 1942 when he strolled into the Waldorf Hotel with a raging hangover and asked for “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of hollandaise”.

Instead of looking askance at him and saying in a very stern manner, “We Sir, are a classy establishment and hence not familiar with the practice of measuring our sauces, Hollandaise or otherwise in units of sex workers”, the kitchen complied and Eggs Benedict was born!

Can we just take a step out to talk about how delicious Hollandaise Sauce is?

OMG..it’s the best thing in the world. Sometimes, when I really don’t feel like cooking? I will buy a jar of Hollandaise sauce, heat it up in the microwave and just dip vegetables…asparagus, broccoli, beans, etc right into the jar for my dinner!

And do you also know that it was only very recently that I reaslised Hollandaise is just French for “from Holland”? I mean, it’s totally damn obvious when you think about it but….at the time?

The Recipe

Given it’s likely New York origins, I used the recipe from the New York Times for my classic version of Eggs Benedict.

Some variations are below.

Variations

The interwebs abound with variations of Eggs Benny. You can change the meat:

This Naughty Benny swaps out the ham for mortadella and adds an onion jam.

You can change the base:

This one swaps out the English Muffins for Potato Rosti.

You can combine it with other brunch favorites such as this Benedict BLT.

Or add some Italian Pizzazz with an Eggs Benedict Pizza.

You can also swap out the sauce

For those who like a bit of booze with their Benny, this one has a beer-based sauce.

I guess the only constant is the eggs…

Oops, scratch that. Here’s a vegan version.

A myriad of other versions can be found here

Modern Day Benedict

In my mind, there can only be one:

What’s your favourite version of Eggs Benedict?

And to whom would you dedicate a modern dish of poached eggs, ham and hollandaise sauce on an English Muffin?

Have a wonderful week!

24
Feb
2016

Breakfast Banana Cream

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, A-Zof Cooking, Bananas, Breakfast, Coconut Yogurt, Vegan, Yogurt

I know I said that we were going to skip the G is for Good Health section in the A-Z of Cooking because I had already made the Cheese and Date Bread. Then I remembered that the banana cream I have been eating for breakfast for weeks came from this same section. And for those of you who care about such things my favourite version is also vegan because guess what? The Banana Cream contains no cream. That’s 1970’s health food for you.

So pretty. And it’s delicious too. And so easy to do. It takes all of about 30 seconds to make .

But first a little digression. They…whomsoever they may be…say that you are what you eat. It might be why health food often gets such a bad rap. I mean who wants to look like the burghul salad which is the first recipe featured in the G is for Good Health section of the A-Z of Cooking.

So back to breakfast and the no-cream banana cream. This tastes and feels rich and luscious so you can almost feel a bit decadent when eating it. The basic recipe for the banana cream is bananas, yogurt, honey, lemon and crushed nuts. I have played with this for a number of weeks now and my favourite combination is to use coconut yogurt and maple syrup. The one highlight of that time I did Paleo was discovering coconut yogurt. OMG that stuff is the BEST. Shame it is so hideously expensive. At the time I looked into making it and it can be done relatively easily. I’ll add that to the to do list! And maple syrup is one of my favourite flavours. Its so good. But you can use plain yogurt or honey – whatever your favourites are.

I have also eaten the banana cream as a topping for granola and swirled into warm oatmeal //porridge and it is good with both!

I have used walnuts as the nuts in these pictures but almonds are also good. Sub in whatever you like. Or, if you hate nuts, use a sprinkle of granola for a lovely crunch!

I’m not overly fond of bananas but I have eaten the banana cream a couple of times a week for a few weeks now and there is no sign of it going off high rotation. I make the serving size below and put half in a container in the fridge for the following day – it keeps quite well overnight. Quick, versatile, delicious so simple and healthy to boot! So much nicer than that burghul salad!

Breakfast Banana Cream

Print Recipe

A quick, easy and healthy breakfast dish. Vegan optional.

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

1 large banana
125ml coconut or plain Greek Yogurt
2 tbsp maple syrup or honey
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp toasted walnuts or almonds

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Place the banana, coconut yogurt, maple syrup, lemon juice and half the nuts into a food processor.
Blitz until just combined.
Spoon into serving dishes and sprinkle with the remaining nuts.

I feel that the A-Z of Cooking has given us two very simple recipes in a row. Next time we head there it should be for the Gourmet section. I have semi-chosen what I am going to cook and it involves a deep fryer so I am going to have to beg, borrow or steal one sometime soon. And if gourmet food and deep frying don’t quite go together in your mind, remember it was the ’70s – all sort of things happened that made totally no sense. Deep fried gourmet food was the least of their worries!

Have a great week!

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04
Nov
2015

Vincent Price’s Buckingham Eggs Jaffle

categories: 1960's recipes, Anchovies, Bread, Breakfast, Brunch, Cheese, Eggs, Jaffle

You made a what???

For for those of you who are already totally confused, let me explain. A Jaffle is an Australian term for a toasted sandwich. And it is a much loved food for breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper, a midnight snack or any of the times inbetween.

And I made one based on Vincent Price’s Buckingham Eggs. And it was very good!

Like I guess many of my generation, the first real inkling I had of Vincent Price was as the voice in Thriller….

I had no idea he could not only cook, but cook like a boss, until I started blogging. It’s one of the reasons why I am so excited that the 50th edition of Vincent and Mary Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes is about to be released. And I am reliably informed by Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers that, in her view, it is the best cookbook ever written! And Jenny knows her stuff!!!

Only a few more sleeps ’til that happens but first, Jenny invited her blogging pals to take part in a cookalong with some of Vincent and Mary’s recipes.

I hadn’t really intended on making the Buckingham Eggs for the cookalong . I was totally primed to make Vincent Price’s Champagne Chicken but, it was only 10:00am. Possibly a little too early for a roast dinner. But I was hungry and a jaffle seemed like the perfect thing to tide me over til dinner time. A quick glance at the fridge revealed eggs, cheese and anchovies. I had a thought process that went something like this:

You could make the Buckingham Eggs
But I want a jaffle
The Buckingham Eggs sound really good.
So does a jaffle.
Anchovy and Mustard butter…-
Egg and Cheese Jaffle
Hmm…what if we…
I like where you are going with this

And thus the Buckingham Eggs Jaffle was born. I’m sure neither Jenny or Vincent would disapprove of my tweaking the recipe slightly to satisfy both the devil and the angel on my shoulder! For the purists, here is a link to the original recipe as cooked by Jenny:

Buckingham Eggs

For my version, I made English mustard and anchovy butter. I could not find any anchovy paste, so I mashed up an anchovy. The mustard adds some heat and makes it a beautiful colour!I could just eat this on toast forever and be totally content!

But, wait, there’s more!

Eggs and cream and cheese and onions. I meant to add some Worchestershire Sauce but I totally forgot! Oh well, all the more reason to make it again next Sunday!

Now, add the onions to the egg mixture and scramble them really lightly. You need them to thicken up but still be quite moist as they will continue to cook once they are in the jaffle iron.

Now, butter both sides of the bread (if you’re feeling decadent ) or the one side if not. Place the buttered sides on the surface of the jaffle iron. This is important otherwise your bread will stick like crazy. Place the cheese on one side and the thickened egg mixture on the other side.

Fold The Iron over. Trim any bits of bread hanging out of the iron and place over a low heat.

The only tricky bit is that once the iron is closed you have no way of telling how much the inside has cooked unless you open it up and have a little peek. Make sure you turn it over at least once so both sides get toasty. As a general rule, once the outside is a dark golden colour, the inside will be perfect. This is the colour you are aiming for:

At the risk of sounding a bit hippy dippy, when cooked like this, the egg and cream mixture and the cheese become one in a gorgeous creamy melange. This is surrounded by crispy, salty, slightly spicy bread…..OMGZ delicious.

This made a super brunch, but if darkness is falling across the land and the midnight hour is close at hand, this would also make a super late night snack!

A massive thanks to Jenny for including me and to Vincent and Mary Price for the recipe.

For all the deets on the cookbook launch and activities around it, click any (ALL) of the links below:

Vincent Price Treasury Cookalong with Silver Screen Suppers

Vincent Price Legacy Tour – for details of celebratory events in the UK

Amazon Page for the 50th Edition of A Treasury of Great Recipes

Treasury of Great Recipes Facebook page

Silver Screen Suppers Facebook page

Champagne chicken up next! Stay tuned….

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08
May
2015

Nova Scotia Eggs, A Confession, Pompeii & Doctor Who

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, A-Zof Cooking, Breakfast, Eggs, Smoked Salmon

Breakfasts and Brunches start the “B” section of the A-Z of Cooking. I chose a smoked salmon and egg combo called Nova Scotia Eggs which was, not surprisingly, delicious. You’d have to go a long way to go wrong with those ingredients.

Having said that, the recipe did it’s best to bamboozle me. Coat the eggs in mayonnaise it says. It actually had me questioning the word “coat”. Because to cover the eggs completely, which would be the normal translation, seems like a LOT of mayo. Then again it also calls for 8 tablespoon of mayonnaise to cover 4 eggs. I’ll say it again. That’s a shit ton of mayo.

Nova Scotia Eggs - Recipe — Nova Scotia Eggs – Recipe

Who knows, maybe Canadians really, really like mayo. Although having said that, I have no idea if the Nova Scotia eggs have any actual connection to Canada.

I also feel that unless I get something off my chest, I will probably never get to find out. You see, I am carrying a deep dark secret in relation to Canada. Well, in relation to two Canadians specifically but I get the feeling they are very community spirited. Do ill by two of them and the whole country takes against you. Anyhow, I feel that until I publicly right this wrong, I may never be welcome in the land where pines and maples grow, great prairies spread and Lordly rivers flow!

It happened like this.

A few years ago we holidayed on the Amalfi Coast. Whilst we were there we did a half day tour of Pompeii. The problem was that we booked ourselves onto a triple language tour. This meant that for each point of interest the tour guide stopped and spoke about it in Italian, English and Russian. Then there was time for questions. Of which the Italians and Russians had plenty. And she would duly translate the answers into the other two languages. Kudos to the tour guide for being fluent in three languages when sometimes I feel like I struggle with just one, but it meant the going was SLOW. So slow that, had there been glaciers in the vicinity, we could have watched them moving and marvelled at their speed compared to our progess through Pompeii.

An hour in, and we weren’t even inside the walls. He was starting to get antsy. “Come on, this is crap, we’re never going to see anything at this rate. And don’t you know about it?”

I may have slightly bigged up my knowledge of Pompeii. I had studied it in art class in high school for what seemed like an eternity however, high school was OMG, 20 years ago.

Excuse me while I have a ~~minor~~ major flip out about that.

OK. I’m back. I’m centred and TWENTY YEARS?

Holy Crap.

Back to Pompeii…anything to blank out the horror….During the next few Russian and Italian sessions we started a muttered debate. He wanted to leave the group and strike out on our own, armed with our purchased tour book and my…ahem…vast knowledge. I was equally adamant that we had paid for a guided tour and dammit, a guided tour we would have.

“Are you guys thinking about ditching this ?” Our conversation was interrupted by a whisper coming from a guy standing beside us. (We were all being very quiet so as not to disrupt the relentless Italian / Russian chatter).

“Yes” Him.

“No” Me.

“Cos we are too”. They were a Canadian couple on honeymoon and after a few more murmered exchanges we decided to very quietly leave the group and explore on our own.

“And we don’t need a guide. Taryn knows all about it.”

Why is there never a bottomless volcanic crater around when you need to push someone into one?

In retrospect, it was the best thing to do. The four of us covered an amazing amount of ground and had a great time doing it. They had a different book to us so we were all sharing what we had and we all got on really well. Then we reached a point where apparently, back in the day, you could look across and see the cave of the oracle of Cumae. And something in my brain clicked.

“You know that in the days before Vesuvius erupted the Oracle of Cumae told them to get out of Pompeii. Twice. But the people were so hedonistic and so consumed by their material possessions that they refused to go”. All of a sudden, I was Simon Schama. I knew all about the Oracle and the prophecies and I was not afraid to tell the world. The lovely Canadian couple were quite impressed. They even took notes. And He was impressed. Dammit, I was impressing myself. Who knew I paid that much attention in art history classes?

Much later in the day, when we were on the bus back to where we were staying in Positano, he asked if he could see the guidebooks. I handed them over and he started pouring over them with an intensity I have rarely seen.

“Whatcha looking for?”

“All that stuff about the Oracle…did you read that in here?”

“I dunno.Maybe…or maybe in the book at the hotel. Or maybe from memory. Why are you so interested?”

“I want to see if they say if that’s where they got the idea for the episode of Doctor Who”

Oh. OH.

“The w…w…what?”

“You know, the episode of Doctor Who where they go to Pompeii. And the oracle tells the people to leave. Twice”.

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

Except I kinda, sorta, maybe did. So, lovely Canadian honeymoon couple from Pompeii, whose names I have completely forgotten specifically and people of Canada in general. I’m really sorry. I have a very, very bad feeling that instead of telling you some amazing actual factual history, that I may have just given you the summary of the plot line of an episode of Doctor Who.

In terms of accuracy, it might have been better if I’d just sung that Bastille song to you.

Feel free to update the Canadian Wikipedia entry on Pompeii any day now folks.

And enjoy the Nova Scotia eggs, they are delicious. I made them for you!

And please let me in if I ever come visit, I really want to try some poutine.

Have a great week! Signature 1

It’s Breakfast Week at The Kitchn! – Breakfast Week 2015
Live Below The Line: Day 4 breakfast, 14p
Recipe: Smoked Salmon Egg Boats – Breakfast Recipes from The Kitchn

28
Dec
2013

Lending a Hand – Hangover Eggs

categories: Bread, Cheese, Eggs, Hummus, Lemon

Now that I have more storage space, mum has been bringing over various bits and pieces of my childhood that she had been keeping for me.

This included a whole heap of my books, including all of my old Famous Five Books. OMG, I loved these, I must have read each of them a hundred times! And yes, at some point I will do a post on the food of the Famous Five. And it will have lashings of ginger beer.

She also brought over my old Brownie Uniform.

Even better than the uniform was, that, in the pocket was my Brownie notebook and official brownie pencil emblazoned with the Brownie Motto of “Lend a Hand.”

On the first page of the notebook there is a note about a recipe with a big tick next to it. I started this cooking thing young! On the second page is a cryptic note saying “Next week jeans + t-shirt not to wear” I wonder what the hell we were going to do with them…Sadly the rest of the notebook is blank so we’ll never know.

As New Year’s Eve is looming, I thought that in the spirit of “lending a hand” I would share my recipe for Hangover Eggs. And, all you party revellers can “be prepared” and get in some supplies. I can’t remember where I found this recipe originally but over the years, it has morphed into the recipe below.

It is however very flexible. You can add tomatoes to the toast; mushrooms, fresh chilli, or green or red pepper, or anything else you fancy to the egg mix. I also find most bought hummus does not have enough tahini in it and I’m far to lazy to make my own so, as per the recipe, I tend to add a bit. You can do this, use the hummus as is, or leave it out altogether. It’s your raging hangover, you know what’s going to work best for you!

Oh and this is really too good to be saved just for hangover days, I would eat it every day if I could!

For the healthy, you can wash this down with some green tea maybe with the rest of the lemon juice squeezed in.

For the rest of us, an ice cold coke is the perfect beverage.

For the truly suffering, a small glass of champagne just to top up your levels may be in order!

Ok, I think I’m done…better just check….

Yep, I”m done!

Happy 2014 everyone, I hope it’s your best year ever!

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Tag: Breakfast

What Are Eggs Benedict?

Who Was Benedict?

The Recipe

Variations

Modern Day Benedict

Breakfast Banana Cream

Ingredients

Instructions

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