MEXICAN SCRAMBLE

I'm a big fan of quick and easy recipes and leftovers often make their way into an off-the-cuff version of eggs for breakfast. A few scraps that aren't much use for anything else suddenly become a whole meal when you look at them in a different light! These Mexican-ish eggs are actually a 'third generation' meal; Darren made spaghetti bolognese at the weekend, I took leftovers for lunch on Monday, on Tuesday we added spices, made a quick tomato salad, shredded lettuce and grated cheese for quick burrito bowls and voila, Thursday morning I made this out of what was left of the burrito bowl accompaniments. Hardly a recipe, but hope it inspires you to add a little something different to your usual breakfast.

PESTO BREAKFAST PIZZAS

My lovely friend Jo (who's shooting our wedding!) came over a few weeks ago for a cooking and photographing day; I can't tell you how nice it was to have someone snapping along while I cooked, so I didn't have to stop to take pictures. And of course the photos are gorgeous! Scroll to the bottom - it's hard to choose between pictures when they're all awesome - for the recipe and some tips on how to get the perfect runny yolk.

Ingredients for 2
2 flatbread pizza bases (recipe here)
A few tablespoons pesto (the homemade stuff is best - recipe here)
100g smoked lardons
2 eggs

Pre-heat the grill.

Make the bases using my flatbread recipe linked above. Make the pesto - also linked above. Fry the lardons until crisp. Separate the yolk and white of each egg - it's easiest to do this using a small bowl or ramekin to put the white into, and leave the yolk in one half of the shell, keeping it upright in an egg cup. Spread a tablespoon of pesto over the base and sprinkle half of the lardons over it. Pour the egg white onto the pizza and pop under the grill for a few minutes, until the white is nearly set. Take the pizzas out of the oven and pour the yolk into the centre of the whites - return to the grill for a few more minutes until the yolk is set to your liking.

This may seem like a bit of a faff, but after a little experimentation, I found that this is the best way to make sure the yolk stays runny, which is VITAL (in my humble opinion). One recipe I'd seen suggested baking the pizza (with both white and yolk added at the same time) - but the result was a strangely marbled, hardened yolk and a barely-cooked white, which you can see in my instagram snap here; still tasty though!

Thanks for the photos, Jo! Please can you come be my live-in photographer?

SWEET POTATO MEE GORENG

Move over courgetti! There's a new vegetable noodle in town. It turns out that my trusty little spiralizer can turn its hand to pretty much anything in the fruit and veg aisle. In this case, sweet potato takes the place of noodles to make this tasty take on mee goreng.

We had mee goreng every day for breakfast in Indonesia and I've really been craving it lately. Thanks to the sweet potato noodles - swoodles? - this makes for a light and healthy breakfast, providing you can stomach slightly sweet and spicy things for breakfast!

Last year my local Tesco introduced a large Tesco Ingredients section and I've found it invaluable; there are plenty of hard-to-find ingredients for South East Asian, Mexican, Korean meals and more and while they aren't always 100% authentic, they are really well priced and everything I've tried so far has been tasty and a real timesaver!

To make one portion
Half a sweet potato
A few tablespoons for frozen sweetcorn
1tbsp Tesco Ingredients nasi goreng paste
1tsp butter
1 free-range egg
Spring onion, coriander and sliced chilli to garnish

Heat a non-stick pan and dry fry the nasi goreng paste. Meanwhile, spiralize the sweet potato. If you don't have a spiralizer, you could make the rice version this pasted is named after - nasi goreng - by grating it instead. Stir fry the sweet potato noodles and sweetcorn in the pan, making sure everything is coated with the nasi goreng paste.

After a few minutes, push the sweet potato to the side, put the butter in the empty side of the pan and fry the egg. Add a splash of soy sauce to the top of the egg for an extra dose of salty savoury tastiness! Transfer the swoodles to a plate, top with the egg and garnish.

Cooking the sweet potato in this way makes for a fresh and crunchy texture; if you'd like the noodles to be softer, blanche in boiling water before adding to the pan.

And voila! This recipe really couldn't be simpler and is definitely going to be my go-to when I'm craving a big nest of noodles. I ended up making three recipes for the blog on the day I made this, so I have to say I'm grateful to have found another carb substitute for when I could do with cutting back.

SATURDAY EGGS

It's nearly the weekend! This isn't so much a recipe as a serving suggestion, but who's keeping track? I eat a lot of eggs and this is actually a quick breakfast from a weekday morning. I posted an instagram of some eggs I had on a normal Wednesday once and when I got to work my colleague was like, "Your breakfast looked delicious, how do you have time to do that in the morning!?" But a cooked breakfast really doesn't have to take much time at all. The picture above is just something I threw together because I was bored of scrambled eggs on toast (apparently, it's possible!) and I just put a spoonful of sweetcorn salsa* from the night before in a frying pan with some butter - always eggs with butter - cracked in an egg and sprinkled on some salt and turmeric. That's it. 5 minutes to make, 5 minutes to eat. So, whether you're making breakfast on a weekend or a weekday, it doesn't have to be this big thing. Don't overthink it. Shovel it down and you're good to go ;)

*sweetcorn, finely diced red onion, red pepper and a generous helping of coriander.

p.s. my dad once said that it's embarrassing to post pictures of what you had for breakfast. Thanks Dad, but when stuff like this happens it's definitely not embarrassing, IT'S FUN, OKAY?

BREAKFAST SANDWICH REMIX: fried egg banh mi

It looks like I already posted this non-recipe recipe - oops - but I was eating this breakfast sandwich every weekend before we went to Japan and I've been stuffing my face with it since we got back too. Actually, our first weekend back we ate this for brunch and dinner on the same day!

Banh mi is a Vietnamese term for bread or, more specifically, baguette. I haven't been to Vietnam before, but apparently they have insanely tasty fresh bread - a throwback to when they were a French colony. Banh mi can also refer to the sandwich itself and they are a crazy fusion of French and Asian flavours featuring pate, meat, pickles, shredded vegetables and herbs. 

Really, my version is nothing new BUT I'm pretty particular about the eggs. I'm of the school of thought that eggs should be fried in butter. Unless you are lactose intolerant, butter is the way to go! In a non-stick pan, heat the butter until gently foaming and gently crack in the eggs. Then (this is the game-changer part) when the whites start to turn opaque, but before they have fully set, drizzle a small amount of soy sauce over the eggs. The soy sauce might leak out into the pan - this is fine, you get a lovely caramelised effect - and then flip the eggs and turn off the heat.

To assemble, slice a baguette in half (warm it on top of the toaster if you want to) and then fill it with grated/julienned carrots and cucumber and a generous handful of coriander. Fill with a combination of sriracha and mayonnaise, top with the egg and eat it. ASAP!

JING sent over their cute diffuser mug with a sachet each of Assam and Earl Grey tea. I'm a big fan of black tea, especially in the morning, and if you have the right equipment (read: a strainer), loose leaf tea is such an upgrade on regular tea bags. When you're buying loose leaf tea, look out for larger leaves; generally this means they are better quality and you'll get much more flavour from them as they unfurl. 

HOW DO YOU BREAKFAST?

I make no secret of my love for breakfast - it's splashed across my About page, Twitter and Instagram, after all! - but the funny thing is that I will eat anything for breakfast. I have no qualms about starting the day with noodles, curry or my all-time favourite, pizza. Yes, I like toast and croissants and porridge and scrambled eggs, but there's something about that special first meal of the day that holds no limits. Perhaps it's because you wake up fresh, a clean slate from the day before; unlike dinner, where you might not fancy a big burger because you ate a hot dog for lunch, breakfast is the first meal for a good 12 hours or so and I am always hungry when I wake up. Thinking about food first thing in the morning, whether it's a salad or a fried egg sandwich, will set me off straight away.

In honour of the best meal of the day, here are some of my favourite breakfast recipes: 
Breakfast burritos (actually, they're tacos, aren't they) with homemade tortillas
Restaurant-style scrambled eggs (super indulgent!)
Dishoom-inspired Bombay omelette
Leftover pilau rice
Pesto frittata
Cheat's banh mi (pictured above). No recipe, just a fried egg, sriracha, mayonnaise, lettuce, shredded carrot and a generous helping of coriander, salt and pepper.

Link or comment your go-to breakfast for everyday or for special occasions, one can never have too many back-up ideas!

BREAKFAST BURRITOS w/ homemade tortillas

Breakfast burritos have become my unintentional signature dish. We eat them a lot and I didn't realise that I talk about them quite a lot too until a friend pointed out I'd mentioned them every time I'd seen her recently!

One of my early blog posts was a breakfast burrito bar for a cheap, end-of-the-month get together and my favoured ingredients are still pretty much the same, except now I make my own flour tortillas too!

This recipe is straight from BBC Good Food, a website I use A LOT, especially for the basics. Darren and I tried out a bunch of different recipes, but this is the one that works the best, so I wouldn't change a thing! To make these smaller tortillas, I halved the measurements on the website, which gave me 12 side plate-sized tortillas.

12 small tortillas:
200g self-raising flour
1/4 tsp salt
150ml warm water
1 1/2 tbsp olive oil

Mix the olive oil in with the water in a jug and then pour over the flour and salt. Gently mix with a spoon - it might seem like it's not going to come together in a dough, but it does. Once the dough is mostly combined, turn out onto a floured surface and knead for a few minutes until the dough is soft and elastic.

To get equal sized tortillas, the best thing to do is roll your dough out into a sausage shape, cut it in half and then cut each half in half and continue until you have 12 equally-sized balls. Generously flour your worktop and then squash a ball with your palm before rolling it out - this seems to be the best way to keep them round. Turning often while you are rolling also helps to keep the circular shape, though no one will ever say 'no thank you' to a slightly square tortilla, if that's what happens to yours.

Once you get the hang of it, it's really quite quick and there is something very satisfying in making your own, not to mention the fact that it probably costs less than 10p to make a big stack and you will almost always have the ingredients on hand.

You will need a really good non-stick pan which is piping hot and splashed with a little bit of sunflower oil. The tortilla should start to puff up a little bit, but your first few might not do this if the pan isn't hot enough. Have a look at the underside and when it's starting to get brown spots (a minute or 2), then flip and brown the other side.

Prep your fillings - I like a couple of leaves of gem lettuce, some halved cherry tomatoes, avocado, grated cheddar cheese, a fried egg and some sweetcorn. Plus lots of tabasco and coriander to serve. A little trick I like for the sweetcorn is to fry it in butter along with the egg and a few splashes of tabasco. It will get a slightly crisp, buttery edge and I'm all in favour of cooking everything in one pan.

These are lovely at any time of day and we've had them wrapped around spicy chicken with yoghurt sauce, as well as with our trusty pulled pork.

BOMBAY OMELETTE

I had an amazing brunch at Dishoom, a "Bombay cafe" in London the other weekend (get the masala chai!) and I ordered their Bombay Omelette, which inspired me to add a bit of spice to my usual breakfast.



Seriously, I think I could eat this every morning. People are often surprised to hear I'll happily scarf down leftover noodles or curry first thing in the morning, yet find eating sausages and bacon perfectly normal (and delicious, obvi). Well, if you prefer your breakfast on the sweet side, don't let me stop you - this recipe makes a lovely (frugal) lunch or dinner too. 

To make one omelette:
2 fresh, free-range eggs
Red onion
Green pepper
Curry powder

To serve:
Cherry tomatoes
Apple cider vinegar
Coriander
Crusty bread



This recipe comes together really quickly, so you want to make sure you have everything on-hand so you can serve it all at once. I like my omelette with a little salsa - finely slice some of the red onion and marinate for a couple of minutes in a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar and a pinch of salt to soften, halve the tomatoes and add to the onion with a few coriander leaves.

Dice as much of the red onion and green pepper as you like, as finely as you like, and set aside. Whisk the eggs with a pinch of curry powder - I think Dishoom's version didn't actually have any Indian spices in it, but I prefer mine this way.

Slice your bread into a big thick slab. You can toast it, but for special occasions (i.e. weekends), I like to rub it with a little olive oil and salt and pop it on a hot, dry griddle pan while my eggs cook.

I like my eggs cooked with butter, but it's up to you if you use olive oil, vegetable oil, coconut oil, etc. Heat a non-stick pan on a high heat with your chosen fat and add the diced peppers and onion. I like to sauté them for less than ten seconds so that they retain their fresh flavour and crunch, but you can cook them longer too. Then pour the eggs into the pan. A proper omelette really shouldn't take long at all (Julia Child says 20 seconds!!). When the bottom starts to brown and it comes away easily from the pan, fold the sides in to create a roll shape and slide it onto a plate. Finish with a generous sprinkling of coriander - after I took these photos, I literally covered mine with the stuff!

p.s. restaurant-style scrambled eggs for the traditionalists.

SUNDAY SWITCH-OFF: breakfast + magazines

Do you know what I did at the weekend? I downed tools for the morning, switched off my computer, left my phone in a drawer and sat down for some quiet, no electronics allowed quality time with myself. I'm totally guilty of watching something on my computer, with one hand scrolling through twitter and the other flicking through a magazine or writing a list. This is what my Sunday morning looked like:

1. A tasty breakfast. My favourite scrambled eggs always hit the spot, plus a mug of builder's tea and a bowl of fruit.

2. A stack of new books. I flicked through the ones that came in my Amazon order this week, but more on that another day.

3. A to-do list for the month. As well as jotting down the things I wanted to get done today, I added a few extra notes to accomplish by the end of the month - there's a new tough love thing going on in these parts and the most boring tasks are top of the list (taxes, painting window frames, etc. etc.).

4. Red Magazine. This is my absolute favourite magazine; I recommend it to all my friends, I pore over every page, read it word for word, and I'm always a little sad when it's finish. This is the one I always sit down with for breakfast as it's so substantial - fashion you want to buy and wear season after season, interesting features, down-to-earth interviews and actually useful health features beyond the latest fad diets. In fact, Red is the only magazine I don't put in the recycling at the end of the month and I happily re-read each issue with the same voracious interest I had for it the first time around.

I'm hoping to make these tech-free Sunday mornings a regular thing, and not just for breakfast. I plan to try out some new crafts, brainstorm ideas and make things and, of course, I promise to share along the way!

RESTAURANT-STYLE SCRAMBLED EGGS

Scrambled eggs are my favourite thing to make at the weekend when I have the spare ten minutes it takes to make them perfectly (in my opinion). Unlike flash-in-the-pan fried eggs that go delightfully crispy when you crank up the heat, I give my scrambled eggs the time to cook at their own pace, which yields a beautifully creamy texture that is at once indulgent, rich and instantly comforting, like the pillowy portions you get in restaurants. I learned this recipe from an old repeat of a Gordon Ramsay Christmas special and it's never failed me. To make the perfect eggs for one: two fresh eggs, a large knob of butter and a teaspoon (or two) of cream.

Use a pan with a small surface area and keep your hob on the lowest setting throughout. Add the butter to your pan and just as it starts to foam at the edges, swirl the pan to coat the base and quickly crack the eggs straight in. Whisk with a fork and then leave them be. No matter how tempted you are, keep the heat very low and gently coax with a curved wooden spoon. Slowly they will start to cook. Watch them like a hawk and keep gently folding them in the pan. Just as they start to set, whip them off the heat and fold in the cream. Don't be alarmed if they look a little sloppy - the heat of the pan will continue to cook them. Turn the eggs out of the pan onto a slice of wholegrain toast and season with a sprinkle of sea salt and a grind of pepper. Thanks to the butter in the eggs, I don't tend to butter my toast, which actually makes this recipe only an indulgence for the time it takes, rather than the calories. Plus, the added fat from the cream will keep you full that little bit longer.

FRUGAL RECIPES: entertaining for friends

I love seeing friends, but towards the end of the month, when everyone's waiting to get paid, it can be hard to arrange a get-together. This weekend I decided to have everyone over for brunch so we could have a good old catch-up without waiters clearing the tables and asking if we'll be 'ordering another coffee'. I wanted it to be a nice treat for my pals, so didn't ask them to bring anything, and kept costs low with an easy breakfast burrito bar and fresh fruit pudding, plus plenty of tea and a Bucks Fizz to kick things off.

I made a quick slaw with half a white cabbage, a handful of radishes, half a carrot, coriander, salt and pepper, a squeeze of lime and a couple teaspoons of sour cream (with tasty leftovers for later!). For the fresh salsa, I chopped a few tomatoes with half a can of black beans, spring onions and some sprigs of mint. We topped our burritos with coriander, cheddar, avocado, sour cream, hot sauce and a fried egg. Yum!

For pud, meringue nests with blueberries, sliced oranges and double cream. I'm gonna throw this out there, oranges and meringue might beat a classic Eton Mess for me!

Everything came to under £20 including a bottle of prosecco (!), which is what we would've each paid for brunch in town, so I'm quite pleased with that. I think breakfast is an easy way to have friends over without breaking the bank or asking people to bring things and it frees up the day for other very important Sunday tasks such as bubble baths, blogging and going back to bed to watch First Dates with a cup of tea!

p.s. Hey weekend, come back quickly, okay?