Cooking Eggs – A basic skill

Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

For an easy to cook, versatile, and nutritious, low cost, food, You really cannot beat eggs. You could easily have your own supply simply by building your own chicken coop, and keeping a few hens. They are also very necessary in a number of recipes, particularly in cake baking and in some pastries.

Eggs are usually used for breakfast – who can forget boiled eggs as a child. Eggs really are healthy cooking for kids. A more sophisticated (and modern) dish is scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Very easy to prepare and impressive to serve to guests. It doesn’t need great knowledge to get it right, yet is one of the simplest dishes to create – to make a really impressive meal, serve with chanpaigne and toast. Otherwise, orange juice and/or coffee is fine.

For lunch or brunch, soufflés and omelettes are great. These require a little more skill, but the results are worth the trouble and many changes can be made with the use of various fillings – cheese of various types give different tastes and almost all cold meats can be used Shellfish, vegetables and ham are a few options you could try.

For a quick tasty meal why not try a Spanish omelette. It doesn’t have to be light and fluffy and is much easier to make. This is really simple. Take some eggs, break them into a bowl and whisk for a few minutes until they are well mixed. Now take a frying pan and any left over vegetables, cut into small pieces. Gently fry the vegetables for a few minutes in a healthy cooking oil (just enough oil to stop it sticking in the pan), then add the eggs and stir gently. Now let it cook until the eggs are cooked all through. Cut into as many pieces as you want and serve. Delicious.

Eggs are also really useful as a finger bite for parties. Boil your eggs until they are hard boiled. Remove the shells and cut them in half lengthways. Scoop out the yolks and put them in a bowl. Carefully set the whites aside – you will want them whole later. Now flavour the yolks. There are a number of ingredients you can use depending on your taste and your pocket. You could try mayonnaise (or salad cream). Cream cheese. Small pieces of ham. A little garlic butter. But only use one flavour in each egg. Mash your egg yolk with your flavour of choice, then spoon it back into the egg white halfs. Serve on a bed of lettuce with a garnish of parsley. These can be used as an entree for a main meal, simply serve them with salad.