Breakfast at Food for Me
We enjoyed a lovely hot breakfast recently at Food for Me (895 Albany Highway, East Victoria Park), washed down with creamy strong cappucino (Jac) and a pot of English breakfast tea (me). If a menu features eggs benedict or a similar dish of poached eggs and hollandaise, that’s what Jac will always order. At Food for Me, it’s eggs florentine – poached free range eggs served with smoked salmon, spinach and hollandaise sauce on thick toast (AU$16.00). My makan buddy C, you would love this!
Jac was very pleased with the runny egg yolks, and enjoyed her breakfast very much. When Jac’s dish arrived, I thought it looked like it needed more hollandaise, but by the time Jac cut into the eggs and released those bright gooey egg yolks, it looked like that thick sourdough toast had plenty of juice to soak up.
Quite predictably (for those of you who’ve become familiar with my love for a big cooked breakfast), I ordered the appropriately named “full belly breakfast” (AU$17.00). This is Food For Me’s version of the full breakfast fry-up, with two sunny side up free range eggs, bacon, chipolatas, tomato, mushrooms, and thickly cut toast. The egg yolks were perfectly soft, and the egg whites had tasty golden brown crinkly edges. The toast had a pleasurable chew and was perfect for mopping up every drop of gooey egg yolk off the plate. On our plates we each had a small dish with a triangle of butter and a little serve of the chef’s homemade chutney. The chutney was a lovely addition – quite sweet, very good on the toast and delicious eaten with the salty bacon and chipolatas. It reminded us of the chutney that Jac’s mum makes from her family’s farm recipe – sorry, I don’t have a chutney recipe to share, but the Country Women’s Association (CWA) cook book would have something very similar.
People often ask me how come the scrambled eggs we cook at home are so yellow, and how our boiled and fried eggs have such bright orange yolks. There are two things that contribute to this. First: we buy free range eggs. They cost a little more, but the quality of the eggs and the brightness of their yolks are just superb and well worth it. Second: we don’t overcook our eggs – we leave the egg yolks soft and gooey. From my experience, egg yolks tend to change colour from orange (if they were orange to begin with) to yellow when they’re overcooked (picture rubbery overdone fried egg yolks, for instance!). As you can see, the free range eggs at Food for Me were cooked to perfection, leaving the egg yolks vividly orange and temptingly soft, ready for popping with a fork. I guess I’m always impressed by a chef who knows how to cook an egg properly. :)
And if you’re interested and missed it, I have previously posted instructions from Jac for how to cook eggs sunny side up.
The couple sitting next to us shared (yes, shared! Didn’t we feel like piggies! :-P) the oven-roasted mushrooms with spinach and crumbled Danish fetta, all on top of sourdough toast (AU$13.00). It looked simply scrumptious. Our breakfast was very good – we plan to return to Food for Me sometime for another feed.