Mothers Day breakfast
We had Jac’s mum Pattycakes over for an early Mothers Day breakfast on the 4th of May.
We planned three courses – fruit to start, followed by a fry-up and then waffles to finish.
While Jac cooked mushrooms and chipolatas for the fry-up course, I got to work assembling the fruit platter. There’s something really pleasurable about cutting and arranging fruit while your nostrils fill with the tantalising smells of frying garlic and butter and you listen to the sound of little porky sausages sizzling and whistling as they cook in the pan.
On the platter, I placed oranges, watermelon, papaya (also known as pawpaw), kiwifruit, banana, prunes and dried apricots. The papaya could’ve been a little riper but was still quite sweet. I de-pithed the orange and removed the watermelon rind and the papaya skin. When it comes to fruit I am anti-seeds/pips/stones – so I’d purchased pitted prunes, seedless watermelon, de-seeded papaya and navel oranges.
For the fry-up course, we’d planned to do a mini fry-up, with small items (hence “mini”) – fried quail eggs, cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms, chipolatas, and some sort of small toast. I thought it would be fun and cute and also ensure that we’d have plenty of room for the waffle course. But then we couldn’t find any quail eggs, and the smallest eggs we could find were large ones – according to the egg size chart on the Golden Eggs carton, they’re supposed to come in medium, large, extra large and jumbo, but there weren’t any medium eggs to be found in any of the shops we looked. Oh well. It worked out very well in the end.
We bought pane di casa rolls from Baker’s Delight (the small pane di casa bread rolls, as opposed to a full-sized loaf), which Jac sliced into chunks and toasted under the grill. I love this bread lightly toasted and then smeared with butter.
As Jac and her mum tucked in, I kept taking photos. My plate’s the one in the foreground. Jac is sitting to my right, her mum on my left. You may notice Jac’s egg is over easy, while her mum’s is like mine, with a soft yolk.
So, on my plate – grilled cherry tomatoes, which were really juicy and sweet. I could’ve eaten a whole mountain of these. As usual, Jac served me the panfried garlic cloves along with the mushrooms. The pork chipolatas were meaty and delicious. Jac ate hers with chilli sauce while I ate mine with smokey barbecue sauce. I had two pieces of toast – one with butter, and the other with butter and cranberry with blueberry preserve. I guess the fry-up wasn’t quite so mini after all! I washed it all down with a glass or two of 100% orange juice.
Jac fried the eggs in metal rings to contain their shape, so they’d seem more mini than they actually were. I love how eggs fried in rings end up so nice and round and thick. The toasted pane di casa was perfect for mopping up the gooey egg yolk and the soft, curdy bits of egg white.
After we cleared the fry-up plates away, I made the hot drinks and got to work with the waffle maker. I’d woken up early that morning and made the waffle batter ahead of time, so all I had to do was cook the waffles. Our waffle maker is a Breville Waffle Creations. It works well enough, but I’d like a proper waffle iron, which makes waffles with really deep squares that I can fill up with maple syrup. I’d like a nice round waffle, not this new-fangled heart-shape. Just doesn’t seem like a real waffle this way. We ate our “waffles” with lashings of thickened cream and maple syrup (we buy Camp maple syrup).
If anyone’s interested, I got the waffle recipe from here. It made about nine of the waffles like the one pictured in the photo above. I liked the flavour of the waffles – not too sweet on their own (only one tablespoon of sugar in the batter), which was perfect – plenty of sweetness was added via the maple syrup, after all. The recipe that came with our waffle maker is quite similar, but uses butter or margarine instead of vegetable oil, and includes three tablespoons of sugar instead of one. We ate four waffles between the three of us, and the other five I left to cool and then placed in single serve freezer bags for later.
A Happy Mothers Day to my readers and friends who are mums, if you’re into the whole Mothers Day thing. In case you’re wondering why I haven’t done anything for my mum for Mothers Day, we don’t celebrate Mothers Day in my family. My mum’s not into it at all. Ditto my dad and Fathers Day.