Perfect fried egg

For perfect fried eggs, break the eggs carefully into a frying pan with a little oil that is wam, but not yet hot.  Too high a heat makes the base crisp – which some people quite like. However, most people prefer the whites soft, but not runny.  If you like the yolk hard, just pierce it with the point of a knife and let the yolk spread out a little. 

Season with Annie's Mixed Herbs, freshly ground pepper and salt, if you like. Once the white is setting and starting to lift, lower the heat and cover the pan.  This saves you from either having to turn the egg over, or flip hot oil over it to set the eggs.

My mother always told me to use the back of the knife to crack the egg.  She was right!

Banana skin bacon

 

 This sounds like veganism gone to extremes, but is actually extraordinarily good!

Serves 2

Skins from two bananas

1 tsp smoked paprika

1 tsp soy sauce

• Take the banana skins and cut off the stalk and the base. Scrape the white ‛pith’ off the skins so that they are almost translucent.  Cut them into strips along the ridges.
  

• In a wide bowl, or on a dished plate, lay out the skins. Spoon equal amount of smoked paprika and soy sauce over the skins mixing and turning until the skins are completely covered with the mixture. Add more if necessary.

• Leave the skins to marinade for a quarter of an hour or so.

• Add olive oil to a frying pan. Scrape in the skins with any leftover marinade and fry over a fairly high heat, turning them as necessary until they are nicely browned on both sides and turning crisp.

• Add to a traditional ‛English Breakfast’, or use in Bacon Sandwiches.

Fried bread

As well as being delicious with the 'cooked breakfast' and with eggs, this is also an acceptable substitute for toast, if you have no toaster and aren't counting calories.  Indeed, you can make passable toast in a good quality frying pan, without the oil.

1 tbsp olive oil

1 slice bread

• Heat the olive oil sizzling hot in a frying pan.

• Put in the bread, move it around to mop up the oil and then turn it over. There should still be some oil in the pan and you should mop this up, too.

• Keeping the heat high, cook the bread until it starts getting crisp and some of the oil that has been absorbed starts to run out again. Turn the bread. If it isn’t sufficiently brown, flip it back for a bit longer.

• Then cook the other side. When it’s properly cooked, it should be crisp on both sides.

Refried Potatoes

These are so delicious, that I often cook extra potatoes the night before so that I can have them for breakfast next day.

Ingredients

 

Cold boiled potatoes

1 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper or Annie's Seasoned Salt

 

Method:

• Cut the potatoes into chunky pieces, while heating the oil in a frying pan.
• Ensuring that the oil is hot, put the pieces of potato into the pan. Although it’s a bit fiddly to do them one at a time, it actually makes sense, because all the pieces are in contact with the oil and can be turned over to brown the next face.
• By the time you’ve put every piece in the pan, you can start turning the ones that were put in first. Ideally, they fry brown and crisp. Grind salt and pepper over them while they’re cooking.
• When they’re all heated through and crisp, serve with fried or boiled eggs, a fried tomato – or just one their own!

Breakfast pancakes

 

Serves 2

1½ cups milk OR water

2 tbsp olive oil OR melted butter

1 egg OR ¼ cup water

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tbsp ground flax seeds

• Measure 1¼ cups of the milk into a jug or bowl. It should be at least ‘room temperature’, because if it’s too cold, even a hot frying pan will be insufficient to raise the batter. If in doubt, warm it until it’s ‘hand hot’.

• Add the oil or butter and then whisk in the egg or flax seeds/water. Dump in the flour and then whisk.

• Add the baking powder and whisk again. Check the consistency. Made with wholewheat flour, this can vary, depending on the absorbency of the flour. For thick pancakes, the batter should drip off the wires of the whisk, but only just. If it seems too thick, add some more milk or water. If you’re uncertain, test a teaspoon or so of batter and see what it looks like. Normally, you will need all the milk. Leave it to stand for about 10 minutes.

• Put your frying pan over a high heat. If you feel it might stick, put in a few drops of oil – the pan acts as a griddle: you don’t fry pancakes.

• Sprinkle a few drops of water onto your frying pan. If it’s the right temperature, they should dance across the surface before evaporating. Now drop a couple of tbsp of batter into the pan. It should immediately start to bubble and then cook dry around the edges.

• When about a third of the pancake looks dry, turn it over to cook the other side. You should be able to get a production line going and cook about three at a time. Keep them between two warm plates, or in a low oven until they’re all cooked. Regardless of what the pundits say, they seem to stay fine like this and don't need to be layered with greaseproof paper.

Serve with jam and yoghurt, preserved fruit and cream, or whatever takes your fancy.

Thrifty Smashed Potatoes

 

In my wanderings through food blogs, I keep coming across the serving suggestion of ‛smashed potatoes’ and for a long time, I assumed that this was a new and trendy way of saying ‛mashed potatoes’.  However, I saw a recipe for them, linked under something else I was looking for and All Was Revealed.  

I suspect that the better celebrity cooks are trying to improve people’s dietary habits; they also realise that many of their fans are as lazy as the rest of us (and probably much more so than their grandparents) when it comes to cooking, so they make a lot of use of an oven, on the principle that it does the work without being supervised. I thoroughly endorse their first goal – smashed potatoes retain their skins; I am much less enthusiastic about the latter – ovens require a lot of energy and we should all be using as little as possible.  (I should be so much happier if celebrity cooks and food bloggers enthusiastically endorsed counter-top ovens, which are, of course, a complete irrelevancy to Voyaging Vegetarians.  Apparently, according to Vegan Punks, smashed potatoes can also be finished in an Air Fryer, which is even more of an irrelevancy!)

Anyway, below is my way of producing smashed – or far more accurately, squashed – potatoes without an oven.

Serves 2

 

8 smallish potatoes (about 50mm diameter), scrubbed

½ tsp garlic granules

1 tsp Annie’s mixed herbs

salt and pepper

olive oil

• Put the trivet in the pressure cooker, add (sea)water just up to the level of the trivet, put in the potatoes and cook at full pressure for 5 minutes

• Reduce the pressure at room temperature

• Put a large frying pan over a low heat and add some olive oil – just enough that you can swirl it round the pan.

• Take a potato, put it on a chopping board and just split the skin with a sharp knife, in a cross – if the skin is a bit tough, it may not split on the top of the potato unless you do this.

• Now take a broad spatula, or – if you don’t mind making washing up – the base of a cup and gently squash the potato so that it splits into several lumps, still joined by the skin at the bottom. Carefully lift it into the frying pan, followed by the others, dealt with in the same way.

• Sprinkle them all with garlic, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper and cover. Cook for about 15 minutes until the base of the potatoes is crisp. If you cook the potatoes first, they can be crisping up while you make the rest of the meal. They will stay hot long enough for you to cook a separate vegetable, too, if you only have two burners.

These potatoes are, in fact, a great substitute for mashed potatoes: not everyone likes peel in their mash, but most people love crispy potato skins!

Variations:

• You can use whatever herbs or spices take your fancy, of course and fresh ones would be lovely.

• I suppose you could always serve these smashed potatoes ‛loaded’ as USAnian food bloggers would say, which I gather means covered in whatever takes your fancy. I’m not a fan of heaps of different ingredients piled haphazardly on top of something else, but I can see the toppings that you might put on baked potatoes, to turn them into a full meal, would work well on smashed potatoes.