Almost all the cooking shows I’m watching has someone poaching an egg at some point. I also saw it in Julie and Julia (or was it the other way around?)
Not only that, but I have a surplus of eggs at the moment. I never seem to remember that I have them at home when I spot a new carton in the supermarket. Before my experiment with poaching, that meant we had 28 eggs in the refrigerator, and some were moving towards their Best Before Date.
Clearly some cooking had to be done with eggs.
And then the notion of attempting to poaching them came to mind. The sister was encouraging (but wanted no part other than as an observer, which was fair enough.) My Norwegian cookbook from the early 80s and Delia Smith’s How to Cook both said the same thing (and Nigella did not even mention poaching an egg in her How to Eat…) to put a small amount of water in a frying pan, put it to boil, and down to simmer and crack a fresh egg into that.
Well, that was nothing like what I was seeing at the telly. Apart from the water and the egg, it was two separate worlds entirely. So I tried with a mix.
It was not very successful. Well, to a certain degree, it did resemble a poached egg. And the yolk was runny when I poked it. But it just did not look like anything we wanted to eat.
And it has taken me two days to recall why it was not tempting me at all (something I should have thought of before I started the experiment): I have never been a fan of eating runny egg yolks.
Instead we used a frying pan and fried four eggs instead. That was yummy. But while the sister had hers sunny side up – I ended up frying mine on both sides.
