Brunch at the Living Room

We met some friends for brunch at The Living Room in Islington. It was a bit confusing as they had a breakfast menu (10am - 5pm) and a brunch menu (12pm to 5pm). I had eggs florentine, which were nice, the eggs were runny, but the hollandaise sauce was a bit much. One egg was eggy enough for me. I ate the lot though, then felt a bit funny, and as if I needed another flavour in my mouth - fast. One of my friends had chosen eggs florentine too - she felt the same, so we ordered a dessert each. She had rhubarb crumble and I chose warm chocolate cake.

When it arrived I thought, oh dear, it looks like a treacle tart out of a tin - I hate it when places put cake on their menu, then give you some sort of a chocolate pudding. it didn't taste of much, but and at first I thought it was a bit chemical and not very chocolatey, but I carried on regardless. I'd already asked them to change my diet coke as it tasted of chemicals, only to be told it was Virgin cola and everyone says it tastes a bit funny. They kindly swapped it for some sparkling water for me. After a few bites of my pudding I realised they'd given me treacle instead of chocolate sauce, then a few more bites later, I noticed the pudding was more treacle than chocolate and it dawned on me (eventually - it was a Sunday morning) that I had the wrong pudding. I felt like I'd eaten too much to send it back, so I finished it - then felt sick as it really wasn't very nice. And because I realised I'd just eaten £4.50 worth of pudding that I hadn't even wanted. Pretty rubbish. Stupid Sunday brain. And, to top it all off, I saw people eating food that wasn't on the brunch menu, and realised the lunch menu had been available all along - a bit disappointing, as I hadn't really wanted eggs after my fry-up yesterday anyway. Oh well, c'est la vie.

A good English fry-up...

can rarely be beaten, except maybe by steak. Perhaps I should do an English breakfast with steak too - that would be cool. This was my fry-up this morning, which we had about lunchtime, so I guess I could call it brunch. As you can see, it has a fried egg, crispy sausages and ubercrispy bacon, grilled tomatoes (drizzled with balsamic vinegar for extra sweetness) and mushrooms and onions. I put a bit of cayenne pepper with the mushrooms and onions and a small clove of garlic for some extra kick. My other half had baked beans too, but I'm not a fan of them so I didn't. Neither of us like fried bread either, or black pudding particularly, so for my taste, all the basics were here. Maybe some potato waffles or chips would have been good too - but a bit unnecessary, I think. I had ketchup on the side, of course - how could you have a fry-up without Heinz ketchup? Impossible.

Friday = egg day

For breakfast, at least. I think I could have difficulties digesting eggs more than once a day. Eggs are funny - they're one of those foods that sometimes, inexplicably, make me feel sick as a dog, and other times they sort me out and stop me feeling sick as a dog. They're great on a hangover, but occasionally they can make me feel queasy even if I haven't caught sight of any booze for days. Strange. And, obviously, they're a great food - anything that's a key ingredient in cakes and baking must be pretty great. And they come directly from the hen - animal to plate, there's not much that can be done to muck them up, I hope.

But, anyway, having eggs for breakfast truly sorts you out for the day. We've been eating yoghurt, blueberries and sugar-free museli for breakfast recently, which feels like a healthy way to start the day, but we'd run out of yoghurt by Friday, so we realised it was a day for eggs. We each had two soft-boiled eggs with soldiers (which were spread with bovril - bovril toast and eggs is a fantastic combination, especially with scrambled eggs, or as soldiers with boiled). This photo's a bit dark, but the egg looks nice. Hmmm, I think I might be having boiled eggs for breakfast tomorrow too...

Friday eggs and cake

It doesn't sound like a great combination... Thankfully it was eggs for breakfast and chocolate cake for an afternoon pick-me-up.

We had scrambled eggs for breakfast - a Friday treat. It really set me up for the day and I was barely hungry at lunchtime. I met my boyfriend for lunch in a Soho Thai restaurant but I was meeting someone in the afternoon and so I avoided all the great-looking garlic or curry dishes, unlike my boyfriend who had a sizzling dish of chili and chili squid. The smell permeated my clothes and hair and made me salivate like nothing else - my fried rice with prawns, pineapple and cashew nuts seemed extremely bland and boring in comparison.

I'd hardly slept on Thursday night and had a resulting low energy moment at about 5.00. I knew I wasn't going to get to eat until much later so I stopped by cafe nero as soon as I could and grabbed a slice of decadent chocolate chunk cake (or something). It was pretty gross. Why are bought cakes so dry and lacking any depth of flavour? The only thing to recommend it was the buttercream, which was the bit with the chocolate chunks (not like real chocolate though) but the icing was quite stale. I had another bit of the buttercream after I took this photo, then left the rest. Such a waste - I should learn not to order chocolatey things in cafes - I just don't get why they're always so horrid...

I can't even remember what we had for supper. Oh yes, another pork stirfry with noodles and chow mein sauce. My boyfriend cooked it for me as I collapsed on the sofa after we came - perfect.

Angela's Christmas Eve Rum Truffles

I can't sleep. But 8.30 on Christmas morning in a child-free house is definitely a time for sleeping...

As I forgot to blog about the chocolate truffles I made last night, I thought I'd upload them now, before seeing what needs to be done in the kitchen. I made a similar batch to those I rolled for my friend's birthday on the 9th December, but this time I made sure there was a serious amount of booze in there - it is Christmas, after all. It's been sort-of a tradition over the last decade or so to make them every year if we feel like there isn't enough chocolate in the house at Christmas.

Another great breakfast...

A bacon and egg butty. This morning's was cooked to perfection by my boyfriend - we think it's possibly the best thing he's ever cooked me. Toasted wholemeal bread, 3 rashers of unsmoked back bacon, grilled to a crisp, a perfectly fried egg and a swirly squeeze of tomato ketchup in the finished butty. It looked so good I took two photos of it in different stages of its construction. Oohh, with the runny egg about to drip out of the edge of the sandwich... doesn't it look good?

Scrambled eggs on toast

Is the best breakfast to warm you up. Creamy, steaming eggs on hot toast (preferably buttered with lurpak and spread with a thin layer of bovril) is also the ultimate comfort food. It's great when you're ill or wake up on a cold November morning and your heating is on the blink, like I did this morning - scrambled eggs on toast was just what I needed. It would have been best with crispy bacon too, but it was difficult enough in my semi-frozen state to do eggs, let alone bacon too. And the flat was so cold I didn't feel it was sensible to let the toast lose any heat as I buttered and bovriled it, so I had it without. It was good though - a hot breakfast on a chilly morning just can't be beaten.

Feeling the burn again...

20/10/06

It's not been a good week for burns. I was creating a tuna nicoise salad last night (see left) ... I put the organic Charlotte potatoes in to boil, then later on added green beans to the pan. I finely chopped a red onion and sliced a few olives (I only had green rather than black), some cherry tomatoes, added it all to the bowl with some lettuce and a drained tin of tuna in springwater. I made the dressing (crushed garlic, grainy mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil, a pinch of sugar and seasoning) then I thought I'd better give the spuds and beans a quick stir as the beans as usual had floated off to the sides of the pan. But as I stuck the spoon in to stir, in an unfortuanate mix of circumstances somehow the potatoes bundled on top of each other, splashing boiling/simmering water straight out of the pan and on to my stomach. Owww... Bloody painful. I cried out with an animalistic, shrill yelp. Which even at the time sounded weird. I drained the potatoes and beans, boiled then shelled the eggs and mixed the salad together, all with a great big block of ice held to my belly. I've got the leftovers for lunch today and they'd better be good. I just hope burns don't come in threes...