As a cook, my Swedish mother was best known for her Swedish meatballs, an indelicacy now familiar as the reward for completing the big-box retail maze called Ikea. Second-best was the limpa bread (vörtbröd) she baked every Christmas. She once won an award for that one. Maybe twice.
But her most leveraged dish was the breakfast she made for us often when my sister and I were kids: soft-boiled eggs over toast broken into small pieces in a bowl. It’s still my basic breakfast, many decades later.
Mine, above, are different in three small ways:
- I cut the toast into small squares with a big kitchen knife. (For Mom the toast was usually white bread, which was the only thing most grocery stores sold, or so it seemed, back in the 1950s. I lean toward Jewish rye, sourdough, ciabatta, anything not sweet.)
- Mom boiled the eggs for three minutes. I poach mine. That’s a skill I learned from my wife. Much simpler. Put the eggs for a second or two into the boiling water, take them out, and then break them into the same water. (Putting them in first helps keep them intact.) Make sure the water has some salt in it, so the eggs hold their shape. Pull them out with a slotted spoon when the white gets somewhat firm and the yolk is still runny. Lay them on the toast.
- I season them with a bit of hot sauce: sriracha, Tapatio, Cholula, whatever. That way they look like this before I chow them down—
The hot sauce also makes the coffee taste better for some reason.
Thus endeth the first—and perhaps last and only—recipe post on this blog.
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