Today I made myself breakfast food for dinner. For the last couple of weeks, I've been craving Eggs Benedict and wanted to go somewhere for brunch so I could order them. This hasn't worked out well: one weekend, we slept too late to be served brunch, one weekend, I forgot I wanted to go out for eggs until around 5PM, last weekend we actually made it up, dressed and out in time but the place where we went quit doing brunch food about 6 months ago.

I checked another place nearby which does do Sunday brunch, but found in searching their online menu that they'd ruined Eggs Benedict. To me, Eggs Benedict is a specific thing involving specific elements, and mucking about with those elements results in a dish that is NOT Eggs Benedict, but only vaguely reminiscent thereof. As far as I'm concerned, Eggs Benedict contains an English muffin, Canadian bacon, a poached egg (preferably with yolk just a wee tiny tad runny) and Hollandaise sauce. I might go so far as to grant a slice of cheese on the muffin, or a few small bits of grated cheese sprinkled on top, but that's as far as I'm prepared to go with Eggs Benedict experimentation. This restaurant (whose fare I quite like otherwise),
had eliminated both English muffin and Canadian bacon, using instead a buttermilk biscuit and Virginia ham. Well then - what you have there is hardly Eggs Benedict, is it? It has become merely an Eggs-Benedict-like substance. But it sounded nasty to me; I imagined the biscuit getting soggy amid the egg and sauce - you really need a good English muffin to stand up to the other ingredients - and Virginia ham sounded way too salty to be palatable.

If I was going to get my Eggs Benedict, I'd have to make it myself. In theory, that's not much of a problem; I know how and even if I say so myself, I make good Eggs Benedict. For a long time, that was our Christmas morning tradition, drinking mimosas while I made Eggs Benedict for our family. After that we opened presents. But Alan doesn't really like eggs and you can't buy just two, you have to buy 6 or 12, the muffins come in packs of 6 but the bacon in packs of 10, so I'd either waste food or have to do something odd just to try to use up the leftover odds and ends - I'd rather have purchased one serving. Also, it's kind of tricky for me to do if someone isn't here to help me watch the various elements, because I have difficulty getting the different components ready at the same time: making sure the muffin is toasted, not burnt, at the same time my sauce is cooked and thickened but not curdled, at the same time my bacon is heated through, at the same time my eggs have poached to the exact perfect degree of doneness...and I use a lot of pans and dishes, which would have been nice not to have to the washing-up.

But I wanted them, and not some weird Southern-cooking twist on them, normal Eggs Benedict, so today while grocery shopping I bought the necessary ingredients and after I got good and ravenous, I made them and dang! were they yummy! I wish I'd taken a picture because they came out perfectly; sometimes I tear up an egg or break a yolk getting them out of the egg-poacher, but not today! And my sauce didn't curdle and I remembered to add fresh lemon juice just before serving (squeeze cut-side-up to avoid getting seeds into your sauce), and then I sprinkled a bit of paprika atop the golden sauce covering my treat, so it was just lovely in a purely aesthetic sense as well. I've done the washing-up already so there's no mess anywhere to upset me - yes, we have a dishwasher but this dish requires several of our high-end, copper-bottom pieces of cookware and those have to be done by hand.

So I scorn you, Restaurant-Who-Dares-Tamper-With-Eggs-Benedict! I do it myself! I don't need your weird biscuit-eggs with country ham! I blow my nose at you! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! (Name that movie. C'mon, this isn't a hard one.)