Short Order Chef

Cooking breakfast in our house can be a bit chaotic, especially with all of the diet requirements.  Mattie can't have gluten, which rules out a lot of wheat products, and won't eat eggs, so we settle for buckwheat pancakes (buckwheat is a gluten free flour).  Heather, being pregnant, doesn't do well with high carb meals and often settles for a poached egg with some sort of fried potato and toast.  Liliana will eat anything.  Susan, Heather's mother, will occasionally have a poached or scrambled egg, but, more often than not, goes for cereal.  So, with 3-4 different things going on, I've burned my fair share of toast and have cooked eggs far past the delicate balance of the perfect yoke.  Yes, Heather and Liliana are quite particular in how they like their yokes to be: done, but still a little runny.  More than once, I've caused a flood of tears because the yoke was too well done and not at all runny.

This morning wasn't any different - Buckwheat pancakes for Mattie, a poached egg with fried potatoes for Heather, and a cateye (a.k.a. egg-in-a-hole, egg-in-a-frame, ducks-in-a-pond, etc.) with fried potatoes for Liliana.  For those of you not familiar with this delicious breakfast, you take a piece of bread, cut a square out of the middle, butter the edges, put it on a fry pan, then cook an egg in the middle.  It's quite yummy.  As I put the cat-eye in front of Liliana, she cut it in half, picked up a half, and started eating.  As the yoke oozed out onto the plate, she looked at me and said, "Perfect!  Good job, Daddy!"  There's nothing like getting approval from your daughter that the meal is acceptable!