Starting the Day Off Right

nutritionists, dietitians, doctors, and high school health teachers alike agree that eating breakfast is extraordinarily good for your health. it curbs appetite, meaning you can eat a little less at lunch--hooray portion control!-- it provides energy that you can burn off through the day, and breakfast has a representative from nearly every category of delicious on the food pyramid: bacon, pancakes, waffles, cereals, oatmeal, eggs, milk, bagels, breads, jellies, berry syrups, peanut butter... that might just be my family...

what better way to kick off my new found focus than with one of my all time favorite breakfast foods- eggs in a basket. they go by lots of names-- i've heard toad in the hold, hole in one, bird's nest, and a host of others. they also have a ton of variations in terms of ingredients depending on where you are in the world.

when i was working full time (which, by the by, i think is a joke. i would kill to be able to only work 40 hours a week now. having a child is full time work. until you have kids, you still get at least some days of the month off, usually entire weekends) i would get up every morning and make one of these for myself and one for my husband.

now E leaves at 4 am, so there are no eggs for him. i'm not a good enough wife to sacrifice three good hours of sleep when he can grab one of the 40 nutragrain bars in our pantry.

jp is pretty self sufficient at eating now, so our morning routine is: i plop him in to his high chair, hand him a homemade muffin (those will be coming up in a week or two, when we run out of what i made earlier this week), and head over to my stove. he eats, i cook, then i eat. he's usually still working on his crumbs when i get done. apparently it's pretty hard to eat with any sense of rapidity when you haven't mastered the pincer grip. go figure.

i'm not actually going to include a legit recipe with this. you need a slice of bread with at least one flat side (any bread, really. bread in a bag, homemade, a biscuit or roll will work too), one egg, butter, and a stove/pan.

heat the pan to medium, then do this:

throw your slice o'bread on, crack the egg into the hole, and let'er'rip!!!!!
when the toast is browned on one side, throw a little more butter into the pan, flip the bread, and let the other side brown.

i like to spread cheese on mine when it's done. deliciooooooouuuuuusssssssss

now, here's the "tricky" part. how do you feel about yolks? if you're a leanne, you like your yolk as runny as it can get while the whites still get cooked all the way through. you know the glory of a broken yolk smeared into your cheese and bread and you are intelligent, refined, and probably really good looking. if you're like E, you want your yolk cooked all the way through, soft but solid, you have few taste buds or taste in general (except bed sheets. if you're like E you can pick out amazingly coordinated bedding), and you are good looking, but not as much as your runny-yolk-loving counterparts.

if you want a runny yolk, my way of doing it (which may not be correct, by the way) is to turn the heat up just a tad (maybe a notch or two on a gas, from a 5 to a 6 on an electric) and let the bread and whites cook a little more quickly (think sear, rather than roast). if you want a more firm yolk, keep it at a medium/5 and just cook the toast until it's a VERY golden brown on both sides.

so there's my first deliberately food-ish post.... here goes nothing!!