Survival Sunday 240: Full English Fry Up

In which I attempt to make a tasty English Breakfast

I'm not a very well-traveled person. The most exotic locales I've wandered are Nova Scotia (for a day) and Niagara Falls (also for a day). Besides that' it's mostly just been the occasional trip to Boston with my family. I've never left this continent.

So I've never had a true Full English breakfast.

Which means I don't 100% know what's in one.

I just know what I've seen on the internet, and those components seem to me to be:

• Fried Eggs
• Toast
• Beans
• Tomato
• Mushrooms
• Sausage
• Bacon

Sounded simple enough to me! So I set about trying to make a Full English Breakfast, or, as I'll be calling it from here on out, a Fry-Up.

My first step was cutting and frying my sausage. I've never worked with sausage in a tube before, so that was interesting. I was too impatient to let it thaw completely, so my hand-cut patties were... well, the were a mess. Eventually, though, I got them fried up in my big frying pan and started in on my toast. I nicked a couple of English muffins from my bread cupboard for this, but I'd guess any bread product would work.

I used some of the sausage fat to fry up my "toast". It was lightly buttered, too.

Do not attempt this kind of breakfast if you've got cholesterol issues.

Or if you'd like to have a regular digestion for the next few days.

Regardless, I fried up my toast and stuck it on a plate next to the sausage.

Mmmm.... grease :P

All told, though, it looked really good at this point, and I could've easily just scrambled the eggs and served them like this.

A much more glamorous shot of the toast and sausage.

But I'm nuts, so I decided "time to cook" and got to work on that bacon.

Thick, thick bacon.

I also made sure my other ingredients were close to hand:

A couple of eggs for frying later.

I cut the stem out of the tomato.
I also salted the cut portion generously - which was the only salt I used at all!

The mushrooms were inspected and washed juuuuust before I cooked them!

 Then I turned my pan onto the lowest heat and added my bacon!

Moments after adding the bacon to my pan, this happened!

I let the bacon fry until it looked moderately crispy, then set it aside while I cautiously fried the tomato and mushrooms.

And it was a harrowing experience.

See, when you're cooking with grease, the last thing you ever want to introduce to the environment is water. Tomato is about 90% water, by my estimation. The purpose of the salt (and laying the tomato out on paper towels) was to draw some of the water out and to make the tomato as dry as possible. There was every reason to believe that the tomato would cause the hot bacon fat to explode all over me when I added it.

Thankfully, this was not the case, and I let the tomato and mushroom sizzle together for a while until the mushrooms were soft and the tomato skin began to wrinkle and split. I took out the mushrooms, but I let the tomato keep going and flipped it onto its skin, so the skin became slightly blistered and discolored. When I figured it was done, I took it out and immediately added an egg to the pan.

Also mere moments after being added!

I never raised my pan above a "2" - so, I'd strongly suggest leaving your stove low if you're making one of these. Will it take a longer time? Yes. Will you burn foods as much? Absolutely not.

While I had been preparing most of the meal, I'd emptied a small can of baked beans into a pan on a back burner set to the very lowest setting. While I'm aware that a proper English Breakfast uses beans with some sort of tomato sauce, that's not very common where I live, so baked beans it was!

Sausage, Egg, Toast, and beans!

The overall breakfast was incredible. Each element was tasty on its own (except maybe the tomato, but I'm not a huge tomato fan), but together, they became transcendent. The biggest shock for me was probably the tomato itself, since I figured I'd hate it. I was wrong. When I cut it up and ate the small pieces with beans or sausage, it went from just a tomato to a sliver of bright, acid morning in the slick midnight of the greasy sausage and bacon. The acidity actually helped boost the sweetness from the beans, too!

Actually, I'm pretty sure this meal had all of the flavors: sour and bitter from the tomato (tomato seeds are always bitter to me), sweet from the beans, salty from everything, and umami from the meats and egg!

Also, it was so much food that it couldn't fit on two plates!
My dining companion and I each had a plate with egg, sausage, toast and beans
and we put the bacon and veggies on a third! Good heavens...

So if you're looking to enjoy the food of another land, but you don't have the money to do it, I strongly suggest looking at their culture breakfast first!

That being said, I don't know how England still exists if this is what they eat for breakfast. Even if I'd been a sane person and just had two sausage patties and a couple strips of bacon, the sheer volume of food was overwhelming, and I shudder to think what calories I consumed...

It was 10000000% worth it.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Survival Sunday 234: Breakfast with the Filthy Casual

So, I made more breakfast...

Back in the 1990s, they would tell us that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day", and even then I called nonsense on that noise. Breakfast is important, yeah, but in a modern society where the cycles of day-night are no longer a good indicator of when people have to be awake to do things like, I dunno, earn money to survive in this capitalist wasteland, it cannot be more important than any other food-to-face moment, nor can it be guaranteed to be taking place in the early hours of the day. Pointless rant aside, I never really bought into the whole sanctity of the morning meal bit, and by the time I was in high school, breakfast was usually a cup of coffee and whatever toothpaste I swallowed by the time I had to run out to my cousin's car.

Generally speaking, I'm still a coffee-for-breakfast kind of person, preferring small snacks throughout the day. That might be why I'm the human equivalent of a zeppelin. That and being a couch potato.

So what I'm saying is that I don't make breakfast very often.

When I do, however, I want it to be fantastic, so I don't tend to settle for cold breakfast cereals (which tend to get really gross and soggy in my house during the summer anyway). This morning, I was lucky enough to find some leftover pieces of ham steak in the fridge, enough eggs that I wouldn't feel guilty about eating them, and an English Muffin, which was buried in the back of the bread cupboard. I looked at my bounty and thought "boy, I'd love me some scrambled eggs and toast with some of that ham steak", so that's what I did.

If you don't feel like reading today, no worries! I have a video of today's cooking adventure (mercifully sans cat) at the end, so just scroll on down, and you won't be able to miss it!

Your ingredients:
Butter, 2 eggs, a chunk of precooked ham steak, an English Muffin, cooking spray,
salt, pepper, and whatever condiments for later.

To start with, I separated out my English Muffin (the package of which you can barely see peeking out behind that container of cooking spray). This can be easier said than done, since for whatever reason, fork-split English Muffins are rarely split evenly, which can be a pain to figure out. Thankfully, this one was even and thick, so I could jam my thumbs into the sides and peel the top from the bottom. I prefer this to slicing through an English Muffin with the bread knife, because I like the crumby texture from the pulling, rather than the smooth, boring texture from the knife.

This is how I like my English Muffins to look.
I don't know if these little guys have another name wherever you live.
I just know they're great with butter and/or jam, especially after toasting.

Once my breakfast bread was split, I took out some soft butter we had stowed in the cabinet to keep the cat from getting into it. It's been really nice the last few days, so we haven't had to worry about swift spoilage from the butter. If it were crazy hot, I'd have been stuck with rock-solid butter from the fridge.

Butter it up! This will get the toast nice and brown.

Once my English Muffin was deemed adequately buttered (which was, to be honest, a bit overkill, but hey, I don't eat breakfast often enough to care how much butter I'm using), I turned on the stovetop to low and set down my pan.

I also sipped at my 2 parts cocoa to 1 part coffee and 1 part Ovaltine mix
I've been mainlining since 2004. Morning Mocha 4 Life, yo.

And here's my English Muffin, sizzling away in the pan.

While the muffin was browning, I cracked two large eggs into a bowl and let them settle for a moment while I quickly maneuvered the ham steak from its package and into the pan with the toast. I figured I'd cook the slower stuff together, since eggs are a quick sizzle and serve, more often than not.

Two big ol' eggs. Yes, we store our eggs in the fridge here in the US.
It's something about the way we process eggs so they don't kill us.
... We still get a ton of salmonella cases every year.
Japan, what is your secret?!

Now, while I had my ham steak frying along, I noticed that my toast was quickly going from "almost there" to "yo, I need out, like, yesterday", so I awkwardly flopped the crispy, buttery English Muffin halves out of the pan and onto my plate. Why awkwardly? Because I still suck at using spatulas, even years into my "I guess I'm eating something I made" stage of life.

Photo blurriness aside, that's some delightfully crispy toast right there!

Meanwhile, I also skootched the ham steak towards the middle of the pan for optimum heating. Centered food is evenly cooked food, regardless of if it's in the microwave or the stovetop. I'm not getting into sous-vide cookery. I have 0 experience there and it terrifies me because it's... kinda... not something we've ever done in my family.

But enough about French water baths, let's check on that ham steak...
Looks like it's cooking along! See the brown marks on the bottom of the pan?
That's the brine caramelizing to the pan. Some people confuse that for blood or something.
This ham steak has been cured, brined, cooked, and refrigerated. If there's still blood, we've
got much bigger problems on our hands than we ever thought.

I like to flip my ham steak (or Canadian Bacon, if that's what I'm using, but I'm not) several times while heating it so that the browning is more even.

And also because it's fun.

Did we forget about our eggs? No? Good. While the ham steak is sizzling along (loudly), you'll want to take your eggs and beat them up with a fork. I use kind of a whisking motion with my fork, but however you find it works, do it. You want to make the entirety of the eggs more or less the color of the yolk.

And if they get a bit foamy, even better. That adds volume!

Don't forget to season your eggs. I used plain salt and pepper on mine, but they're great with a lot of flavors! Try them with cayenne or paprika! Add some chives or green onion! Mix in some milk or cream for extra protein and vitamins! Try a little mustard in there! It's all good!

But you don't want to add these eggs to a crowded pan, so now's a good time to check on your ham steak and see if it's ready to come out.

Mine was! It didn't need to be "cooked", since that happened before we got it.
It just needed to be heated through comfortably! The browning was a big added bonus, though.

Once your pan is free of any other food clutter, you're going to take it off the heat and add your lubricant, since the ham will have absorbed any leftover butter from the toast. I used a little cooking spray. Return the pan to the heat, add your eggs, grab a spatula or something, and start moving those eggs, yo. You want those suckers to keep moving every second they're in the pan so they don't burn. Burned eggs suck. Trust me. I have burned many an egg in my day. Ew.

Once they seem almost done, turn off the heat. The pan will finish the eggs as you carry them over to your plate. Roll them onto the plate and prepare yourself for condiments (and likely condemnation from food snobs).

My lovely meal, before.

After.
Do you see?

And of course, once you're finished cooking, it's time for the best part!

Cleanup!

Lol, no. It's eating. It's always eating. Dishes can wait for a full belly. But ideally, you'll have a chance to finish your dishes before you leave for your day.

You definitely want to eat your food before it goes cold, so hold off on dishes until after you've enjoyed your food!

If you've scrolled down this far, you deserve the video, so here you go:

That'll do it for me!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC