The Full English

There are so many options when it comes to a cooked breakfast in our green and pleasant land, and the myriad of options has been expanded for me since meeting my Fiancé, Gayle.  She makes the best Kedgeree and American style pancakes with scrambled eggs, bacon and maple syrup.  Something I turned my nose up at first; ‘Maple syrup on bacon?! Crazy Yanks!’.    She likes me to cook her Eggs Benedict which I had never tried before and now love, and I also love making it at I get to make my own Hollandaise sauce which makes me feel very clever! Some of my favourite breakfast choices, in no particular order:

• Eggs Benedict
• The aforementioned pancakes
• Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs
• Kippers (proper ones though, not that shit in a bag!)
• Smoked haddock with a poached egg
• Kedgeree

But there’s something special about The Full English breakfast; this and the Sunday Roast are probably our best known national dishes and identify England on the culinary atlas.  It’s supposed to be bad for you, but it makes you feel so good!  It has many variations, and it is a matter of personal taste as to what you have in it.  Maybe some mushrooms, grilled tomato, black/white pudding or beans; but at the heart there should be (in my opinion) the best quality bacon (smoked), pork sausage and eggs.  The eggs are another matter of personal taste; have them scrambled, poached, hard boiled, fried or as an omelette.  I tend to see how I feel at the time. 

Gayle is at present at the top of Mount  Toubkal on a charity trek (click here to sponsor her) and I am a bit disorganised, so I hadn’t really thought about food for the weekend, so I had to improvise a bit.  I found some smoked streaky bacon and cocktail sausages in the freezer which had been brought for pigs in blankets, they’ll do!  There were two eggs in the cupboard so that’s those sorted.  It needed something else though, ‘I know’ I thought, a potato rosti!  I’ve only made this once and it wasn’t too good as I think I made it too thick, and I also used a ring which meant that I didn’t get crispy edges.  I wanted another crack at it!  So this is what I did: 

First grate the potato into a bowl and season with salt and pepper.  Potatoes have a lot of water in them, so put the mush into a clean tea towel and squeeze out most of the water, don’t squeeze really hard as you want to leave a little moisture in there, but not too much.  Then add a drizzle of olive oil and mix through.  Heat some more olive oil in the pan medium hot. The heat of the pan is important as you want to brown the outside, but remember it will need to be in the pan long enough for the potato in the middle to cook so you don’t want to burn it!  Make a patty out of the potato with your hands, it should be a little rough around the edges and no more than a centimetre thick.  Add this to the pan and press it down a little, it should sizzle nicely.  Now wait, don’t touch it and this will help the browning process.  After about 4 minutes turn it over and add a knob of butter and leave for another 3-4 minutes.  And there you are.

This worked for me and the rosti was nice and crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, and went great with my bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and fried tomato, yum! I’ll have to try this out on Gayle when she gets home.

Enjoy!