Favourite Things//Six

My magpie mind operates betimes in a strange fashion. An example: when I was thinking about writing this post about eggs, one of my favourite culinary ingredients, I recalled a line from an episode of a soap opera that I saw many years ago. It must have been around the time of a salmonella-in-eggs scare as one of the characters in the soap was bemoaning the temporary loss of what she described ‘as nature’s only convenience food’. How very right she was.

As well as the eggstraordinary advantage of coming so conveniently packaged by nature it is also indubitably true that once you have a box of eggs in the fridge it is possible to whip up all manner of light meals: omelettes; eggs Benedict; scrambled eggs; retro egg mayonnaise which I always think sounds more glamorous when I see it listed as oeufs durs mayonnaise on a menu in France; and that evoker of a twinge of childhood nostalgia boiled eggs with toast soldiers. These are reasons enough to love eggs.

Aside from enjoying eating them I obviously have a bit of an egg-thing as I seem to have a few eggy items about the place. Not least of which is my collection of novelty egg cups; I collected these, for reasons which I don’t now recall, when I lived in London; I never did find a way of displaying them. Although I still like them my taste has evolved and I would no longer like to have them on show. But at the same time I couldn’t bear to part with them so they live in one of my kitchen cupboards and I am never short of a receptacle for a boiled egg.

As my magpie mind was hopping about the place cogitating about eggs I thought about that famous advertising slogan ‘Go to Work on an Egg’. I did a bit of googling and discovered there is a Go to Work on an Egg website. According to the website the slogan is attributed to the novelist Fay Weldon although she says that she was just one of the team that came up with it; incredibly the slogan is now over fifty years old. You can see the original TV ads via the website click here.

Supper tonight was an eggstravaganza of baked eggs with strips of smoked salmon …