I was right. The lady running the place this morning was a complete Nazi. It was so annoying, we spent our first 2 minutes in the place debating whether to go somewhere else. The only thing that kept us in place was our lack of umbrellas and the fact that most of the cafes nearby are complete crap. Eventually the Nazi lady relented because a family at a table took pity on us and packed up early and split and gave us their table. I put it down to the little monkey man making goo-goo eyes at them. He was so cute, he got two parents to cut short their breakfast and hustle their brood out into the pissing rain. I swear he has some sort of mental telepathy powers that enables him to control other people.
Anyway, as the photos show, we stayed and ate. The first one is a stack of pancakes with caramelized banana and maple syrup and ice cream. It went down a treat. Not with me - I didn't even get a chance to stick a fork into it to try it before the gobble-monster over the table had demolished it one handed.
Meal number two was an omellete. She-who-must-be-obeyed loves this particular omellete. It's simple, but it's really well done. It just goes to show that you can two people an egg and ask them to boil it and one will turn out a masterpiece and the other will turn out a shell full of poop. Again, I didn't get the chance to try it as it was scoffed in no time at all.
Meal three was mine - home made hash browns with poached eggs and smoked salmon and rocket and hollandaise on top. Bloody marvelous. The home made hash browns piss all over the idea of using muffins. I'll never eat eggs benedict with muffins again. The hash browns were just so yummy and crunchy. God I hate a soggy hash brown. I really hate the rectangular fucking things that come in a frozen packet and taste like reconstituted earthworms. A hash brown is supposed to be fried in a pan in half an inch of fat or butter. It should be a little bit burnt - dark brown at least. Wimpy little light brown (tan) hash browns are just pathetic. They should be given to lesbians for use as panty liners. They certainly shouldn't be eaten.
This I think was the king of breakfasts - mushrooms with rocket and some sort of chutney with goats cheese. I only got to sample a bit of the goats cheese and chutney, and it was great. The two compliment each other really well. Normally, I look down my nose at a meat free breakfast like this. Eggs Benedict for me are a stretch - I'll accept smoked salmon as a substitute for bacon, but only just. I can't really come to terms with the thought of a breakfast completely free of bacon. And not even an egg in sight!Yet this breakfast is enough to tempt me to cross over to the dark side - the vegetarian breakfast. I think I'll give it a go next time.
The thought of a vegetarian breakfast makes me think back to our caveman roots. Why do we want bacon for breakfast? Probably because a caveman wanted to start the day by killing something before breakfast. Hence the idea that blood sausage is a bloody marvelous thing to start the day with. Black pudding and porridge - breakfast of champions. When I have bacon for breakfast, it makes me think of sticking a spear into something.
If that's the case, what would happen if I had lamb chops for breakfast? Thoughts of Hannibal Lecter come to mind.
Then there was the traditional breakfast, complete with baked beans. I have done this one before and not been impressed. Note that the baked beans are very commercial. The only thing that beans from a tin are suitable for is to stick them into toasted cheese and baked bean sandwiches. Speaking of which, has anyone bought a toasted sandwich maker in the last few years? When I was a teenager, I made a lot of toasted sandwiches because I had one at boarding school and a few of us did a roaring trade selling toasted cheese and bean sandwiches to our fellow starving boarders. The sandwich maker that we had back then was a ferocious little number - you had to watch it like a hawk as it fried a sandwich to a crisp in about 20 seconds flat. Which was good, since we normally had a queue of 20 starving boarders queueing up for a feed.
The new thing that we have now must be some sort of green electricity consuming number. Maybe it is only programmed to run on solar power, which would explain why it is so totally fucked at cooking anything after dark. You put your bits of bread in, go and watch the news (all half hour of it) and come back to find that a few bits of molten cheese have only just started to run out of the back of it. It produces soggy sandwiches. If you want a crispy sandwich, you start it when a movie starts and you take them out at the end as a post-movie snack.
If this thing is the future of electrical goods, then we are all fucked. I can kiss goodbye to my long, leisurely hot shower two or three times a day. We'll be stuck with 30 second tepid showers. I don't mind a nuclear power station being built in my backyard, just so long as I can hook up our shower to the hot waste water pipes.
Speaking of nuclear waste, some people love to have their coffee or hot chocolate served in bowls. I do too, but for me it is a thing to do in France, not Balmain. I am a sucker for dipping bits of pastry into a bowl of hot chocolate at breakfast, but only if I am in somewhere like Nice or Avignon. Doing it in Balmain would just totally fuck my memories of doing it in France. I also could not contemplate eating sausages with mustard and a beer at a railway station unless I was somewhere in Germany. Still, if others want to use them, I am not going to object, except that it increases the chance of me sticking my elbow into someone else's coffee.After all the trouble we had with the Waiter Nazi at the beginning of the meal, it turned out really well. Except for her. No fucking tip for you lady!
No comments:
Post a Comment