The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry | A Sydney Food Blog

The Breakfast Olympics

March 1st, 2008  |  Published in Uncategorized  |  1 Comment

There are no victory laps, hokey national anthems or teary
press conferences about drug allegations, but there sure is a
lot of good toast involved.

Recently Will and I kick-started the ‘Breakfast Olympics’, an overly-dramatic name for our “breakfast-off” where we take turns making breakfast (and secretly try to trump each other’s efforts in the process). It all began when Will received a slightly eccentric present from his parents – it resembled something Madonna would wear in concert if she was born in the year 2970.
Its function isn’t so sci-fi lingerie-esque though: it’s basically a
pair of silicon moulds for poaching eggs.

Undergarment-resemblance aside, it’s actually pretty cool and useful, given that neither of us have perfected that bizarre art of poaching eggs, which involves this head-scratching method of dripping vinegar into swirling hot water to stop the egg whites from spreading, and everytime I’ve done it, I’ve just ended up with waterlogged egg-wrecks. So this nifty mould manages to sideswipe all of that high-maintenance silliness and make poaching easy – even for lazybones like myself.

So Will started off the first week, with a wonderfully simple eggs on sourdough and a side scoop of strawberries and yogurt.
(I added a few shaves of cheese to my eggs – because who doesn’t love a bit of savoury-melted bliss on bread?)


The next week, I followed up with avocado (with a squeeze of lime and a crackling of pepper) paired with garlic-roasted cherry tomatoes on sourdough and – as Will calls them – “poachies”.

I picked up the bread from Crispy Inn, the great 24-hour bakery in Newtown. After working out their arcane “bread code” (you can figure out which flavoured sourdough is which on the shelf by reading the marks on the bread – it seems very Mason-like!), I bought some potato-and-herb bread which was a fantastically homey loaf. (Not only is it a breakfast treat, I bet it would be awesome, matched with a good winter soup – which brings me to another thought: if we can have fancy dinners with ‘matching wines’, surely someone can kick up a menu with ‘matching breads’?
You could run the gamut of classic plain breads to the nutty, olive-studded ones and finish up on a dessert note with some fruit-plump loaves. I hope to see this in a good restaurant one day!)

Will has this very cute ritual where he has to scrape every last scrap on a plate into one perfect fork bite. (Whereas I’m a messy eater who is happy to keep re-spearing bits of food remains that fall off my fork.) In his amazingly-neat style, he managed to compact every last bit of his meal into a Zen-like cube of pure form. It was such an eerily-precise serve that I was actually compelled to make him take a photo of it.

For ‘dessert’, I served mango and kiwifruit in wine glasses, drizzled with yogurt, a sprig of mint and some pine nuts. It totally lived up to the truism that any sweet looks good in a wine glass. It was one of those ridiculously easy things to make that has a high yield of “yums” in return.

So we’re thinking of ratcheting up this Breakfast Olympics game a notch. Will is going to make Dutch-style poffertjes and is thinking we could up the ante even further with a breakfast degustation, with tiny plates of muesli and fancy eggs and pretty fruit and the like. I’m up for it.

As for the food situation with the actual Olympics in Beijing, there’s been a bit of scandal already: a United States Olympic Committee caterer bought supermarket chicken in China and found it “so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested positive”, The New York Times reported recently.

Crispy Inn, 203 King Street, Newtown NSW (02) 9557 3910

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One Comment

  1. dr witmol says:

    My friend in Brisbane sent me a Valentine’s Day present of two heart-shaped silicone egg moulds. I thought of this as rather Feng Shui, so they’re sitting in my ‘love corner’ at the moment (my mother would be proud). As I generally cook omelettes if I cook eggs, I’m thinking of perhaps making heart-shaped pikelets instead.

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Hi, I'm Lee Tran Lam. When not blogging with my mouth full, I'm usually writing, presenting Local Fidelity on FBi radio, making zines, producing podcasts or continually breaking promises about how I really am gonna get through my book pile one day.

All the good pictures on this blog are by photography ace (and patient boyfriend), Will Reichelt, (all the dodgy ones can be credited to me)!

The lovely banner is by friend and ultra-talented illustrator Grace Lee.

This site redesign was made possible by the next-level generosity and expertise of Daniel Boud, whose code-tinkering ways are only outranked by his seriously inspired way with a camera.

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This is a blog I do for pure fun and zero influence – there's no sponsorship, sneaky advertorial or advertising. I pay for all the food mentioned, 'cos it seems the ethical thing to do.


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This is a blog about eating and drinking in Sydney, Australia (with the odd cross-border or off-topic detour). BYO appetite.

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