Breakfast of champions • 01.11.09
I love going out for breakfast. There is something simultaneously relaxing and energizing and having your breakfast made for you in a lovely, preferably sun drenched, locale. However, breakfast out is, for me, often fraught with peril. You see, I don’t like eggs.
I know! I wish so much that I could enjoy eggs. They are a perfect package of food. I see magazine pictures of poached eggs atop crisp salads or fried eggs leaking out of a bacon sandwich and they look gorgeous. But I cannot eat them.
And I have tried! A few years back, my father and I were driving around Ireland to visit all the “relations”. At each elderly auntie’s house a large breakfast or lunch would be prepared for us, usually involving a fried egg. I would try one bite, then cut the rest into tiny ribbons and hide them under my toast. Even now, at home, I make scrambled eggs for Andy a few times a month. I try little bites, hoping that this will be the magical moment in which eggs begin to make sense to me. Never happens.
So this egg-aversion makes going out for brekkie a real challenge. I dare you to try to find a yummy menu item that does not involve eggs in some fashion. It’s hard! I can usually get toast or yogurt and that’s about it. Not that there is anything really wrong with toast or yogurt. I love them both. But they get old after a while.
However, we’ve recently found a cafe at Bondi Beach that serves a breakfast I can fully support. Sourdough toast, topped with a rich, creamy ricotta cheese and slices of fresh tomato. I order it with a side of avocado because everything in this world is better with a side of avocado. It’s a gorgeous breakfast, and one that I wanted to recreate at home. Here are the results:
A slice of toasted ciabatta bread, a layer of ricotta cheese, tomato and avocado and the whole thing is drizzled with some nice extra virgin olive oil, a sprinkling of cracked pepper and coarse salt.
I can’t really give you a recipe for this, because it’s just a matter of buying good ingredients and stacking them on top of one another. But I do urge you to try this for brekkie just once. It’s light but filling, rich but tangy. A perfect way to start another egg-hating day.
