Weekly Food Challenge

Since I'm now a big-shot manager I've had no time to do anything and I've been eating a lot of take-away pizza. Additionally, I now live in a flat with the worst antiquated electric hob since they bulldozed the last postwar prefab. I think the people at the end of Threads had a better cooker. As a result, the most exciting thing I've cooked in the last three weeks has been a Bachelors Pasta ‘n’ Sauce. So while this might not be the most inventive brunch you've ever seen, it's infinity per cent better than my regular fare:

Scrambled eggs with smoked salmon

There are eleventy billion ways to cook scrambled eggs. This is my way. It works.

1. Turn on the heat under the frying pan. The high end of medium but not full blast. Go away and read a book for half an hour.
2. Stick a knob of butter and a small splash of milk into the pan. Not too much milk or you'll get wet eggs. The only difficult bit in this recipe is guessing in advance how much milk is too much, and that's what practice is for.
3. When the butter's melted, give the pan a shoogle to mix it all up. Grind a generous amount of black pepper into the pan (do it now because you won't have time in a minute). No salt. Never add salt to eggs until you're finished cooking them. In any case you're about to add salty, salty fish.
4. A dash of chilli sauce (I'm never going back to Tabasco, I can't, I won't, but you can use it if it's all you have). This step is optional, but trust me.
5. Crack three eggs into the pan and, by the time you've washed the egg goop off your fingers, they'll have started to set. Scribble about in the pan with a wooden spoon.
6. Dump in a generous handful of smoked salmon chopped up into scraps. I've got some fantastic oak-smoked stuff from the farmers' market, but Tesco Value smoked salmon does the job perfectly well. (Don't get that because it's Tesco, but the equivalent cheap stuff from non-Workfare-using supermarkets is fine.) This step is also optional, but it wouldn't be much of a scrambled eggs with smoked salmon if you skip it.
7. Continue scribbling.
8. Take the pan off the heat half a minute before it's done to your liking. The eggs will continue to cook in the residual heat.

Served with crumpets because I didn't have any muffins. And it was fabulous.