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This evening’s culinary adventure involved making Anyone for Brunch? B, L, or D Adaptation (That’s Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner to You!) [recipe], which was exactly the same meal as yesterday, but with a poached egg sitting on top. Remaking the stew is a testament to how ridiculous our endeavours have become, but I have to say it this was the first (and will probably be the last) time that I have poached an egg. To do so, I brought some water to a simmer in a skillet, then added a splash of white wine vinegar. The egg was cracked into a bowl the poured into the water. The white gelatinous quivering goo was nothing if not repulsive looking, and I’m not going to say exactly what it looked like. After a couple of minutes, and also after freeing its creepy white tentacles from the bottom of the pan, I removed the egg with a slotted spoon and let it drain on a paper towel. The egg was placed on top of the stew like a big dollop of goop. You may notice that I only made one egg, egg singular. We are not fans of the egg, particularly when the yolk is supposed to be runny, shudder.

L used his egg allergy as a tremendous excuse to eat just the chorizo-tomato stew and skip on the eggy delight. By default I got to ruin my perfectly lovely stew with rubbery egg white and runny yolk. Bleurgh. That was not a good addition in my book. But, if you like poached egg, this is a great stew and it probably is a reasonable addition.

Tomorrow, we will be making Everything-Crusted Chicken Rolls Stuffed with Scallion Cream Cheese, which sounds interesting, if by interesting you mean ridiculous. This weekend heralds some big changes for us, hopefully. The tiler was here today for hopefully the last time ever, so we have plans to put up a shower curtain, paint the bathroom and actually move in. Farewell basement bathroom, it’s been a spider-filled, mould-avoiding treat. Also, Monday is A’s second birthday so there will hopefully be prodigious baking of piggy cupcakes and maybe the purchase of a ball. Sunday we’ll probably go to the zoo so A can spy water bottle lids in the undergrowth. We considered having a party but we’ve left things a little late to organise anything. Also, we haven’t seen some of our friends since her 1st birthday, as we’re such great people, and we don’t want to seem like we’re only in it for the presents.  So low-key it will be, maybe with a helium balloon thrown in for good measure. Cheap and cheery, it’s all good.

This afternoon, all of our best laid plans for constructive work were abandoned when we had to pick A up from daycare as she had thrown up. We brought her home and she was on rough form for a while, but seemed to pick up as the day went on. There was a touch and go moment when she had hiccups in the bath and looked as if she may follow through at any second, but she was ok. I mention this because we were going to have Seafood Frittata with Fennel, Orange, and Arugula Bread Salad with her this evening but we changed our minds. Eggs, shrimp and crab do not sound like the sort of food you would want to eat if you were feeling queasy.

In fairness, it didn’t particularly sound like the kind of food that we would want to eat anyway, but we ploughed ahead. The process is similar to the broccoli frittata of yesterday, replacing the broccoli with shrimp and lump crab meat, but otherwise doing the same thing. The salad has the same bread (we still didn’t soak it in water then dry it), no bacon, some orange, and the Romaine lettuce is replaced with fennel and arugula.

I made a single serving of the frittata, using 3 eggs. This still made an enormously hefty amount, about half of which was eaten. It was pleasant enough, although not as good as I would have hoped. Compared to the broccoli version of yesterday, the seafood version was considerably more expensive to make, but it was not substantially better by any means. I would stick with the vegetarian version in future. The salad was nothing exciting. The navel orange was pleasant enough, but the arugula and fennel combination was overpowering. Whereas the bread in the salad yesterday made sense in as much as the salad was based on a BLT sandwich, here the bread seemed a little out of place. Croutons, with their crunchy goodness, would perhaps have been a better match.

Tomorrow we will be having Thai-Style Shrimp and Veggies with Toasted Coconut Rice, which sounds good. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to check in at the new house and see how things are going. The demolition phase is just about complete, now the remodelling needs to begin. The place looks much bigger without some of the dreadful attempts at built-in cupboards. The fake wardrobe in one of the bedrooms was enormous, now the actual room looks big. It’s all good. In other circumstances a house filled with gaping holes and cracked plaster and exposed pipes may be a little anxiety-inducing, at this stage it just looks so very much better than it did when intact but inhabited by the previous owners. It’s an exciting time. Also, the living room is now filled with Ikea boxes, which will eventually be the new kitchen; 177 packages, 2,138 lbs. It would take me about a week just to sort them out. Actually in this heat, it would probably take a whole year.

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We have spent the last while glued to CNN in disbelief that the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis has collapsed into the Mississippi. Unbelievable. Disasters are always so hard to get your head around, especially so close to home. We can only hope that fatalities are minimal. It’s absolutely horrendous.

Yesterday our contractor started ripping out the carpeting in the new place, and was going to set about removing the kitchen. Last night I dreamt that he had emptied one cupboard and carefully removed four of the wooden cherry-motif cabinet door knobs and set them down in the virtually empty dumpster. So it was quite a relief when we went over there today to discover that the entire kitchen had been gutted, as had the bathroom upstairs. The fake plastic brickwork and the fake plastic wood paneling are all gone, as are the three layers of vinyl tiles on the floor. Farewell to you all. The upstairs looks so much prettier with hardwood floors rather than the mismatch of stained carpets. And the staircase looks about a million times better in wood rather than furry green. The floors are fortunately in good condition but will need sanding and refinishing, but we’d anticipated that they could be in appalling condition so we are quite happy. 2 days of remodelling down, 13 days left before we move in. We’re keeping all our fingers and toes crossed.

We spent much of today running round buying really dull things for the house- ceiling fans and light fittings, new locks, a replacement radiator. Expenses most certainly pile up extremely quickly when you move. We found a modernish ceiling fan on sale for a reasonable price, but buying 5 of them quickly mounts up. Then Ikea called to say that our kitchen will be delivered tomorrow, but that our chosen sink has been discontinued. So we went out there and chose a sink sight-unseen from their new range. We ended up just bringing it home rather than going through the rigmarole of adding it to the delivery tomorrow. It looks fine, it’s a sink. They could have just swapped the discontinued one for this one and we’d never have known.

So this evening we set about making Broccoli Frittata with Goat Cheese and BLT Bread Salad, about which we were a little sceptical. The recipe calls for 3 eggs per person, but we made our half serving with 4 eggs, and that was more than plenty. The broccoli florets are browned in a little olive oil with some thyme, red pepper flakes and red onion. Lemon juice and a roll of goat cheese was to be crumbled into the pan, but ours did less of the crumbling and more of the smearing in your hands. Messy but tasty at least. Then a mixture of beaten eggs, a splash of cream and salt and pepper was poured onto the mix, and allowed to brown underneath. We prodded it a bit with a spatula as the egg set to keep things moving a little and to stop the whole lot from sticking to the pan. It was supposed to be browned on top in a 400? oven, but we decided to use the broiler instead. It seemed inhumane to roast our little girl asleep next door for the sake of a glorified omelette. It worked fine in the broiler, the eggs rose and became golden exactly as prescribed.

While I made the egg dish, L made the BLT salad. The bread called for was supposed to be a little stale, which ours most certainly was. The recipe says the chopped bread should be soaked in water for a few minutes then gently squeezed dry because you “don’t want the bread to be wet”. Maybe we missed the point of that exercise entirely, but I have to confess that we skipped that step. Why wet the bread if it should be dry? It already gets moist when it comes into contact with the salad dressing (olive oil and red wine vinegar) and that at least tastes better than bread in water. Romaine lettuce, red onion, grape tomatoes and chopped fried bacon went into the salad with the bread and the dressing and a little salt and pepper.

I have to say this salad was really really good. It was fresh and crisp and the bacon and bread were interesting enough to add a little something which made this seem more like a deli salad rather than a side dish. We would certainly make this one again, no question. The frittata was also good, for what it was. I am no great egg fan and L only tasted a morsel because he is allergic to eggs, but this was remarkably tasty. The goat cheese added a distinctive flavour and texture, and the vegetables gave it a little bit of crunch. Omelettes finished in the oven or under the grill always seem so much more satisfying than those fried on both sides, and it’s just as easy to make them. Maybe it’s even easier, as there is no potential flipping disaster waiting in the wings. Overall, a very good solid meal, I enjoyed it.

Tomorrow we will be having another rendition of this meal with Seafood Frittata with Fennel, Orange, and Arugula Bread Salad. We’ll let you know how it goes.

On this the most humid of days, we set about making Chicken Sausage on a Roll with Egg and Fontina, which is recommended as being suitable for “B, L or D: Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner”. This meal is substantially different from the last two chicken sausage recipes; grill seasoning and fennel are added to the ground meat, but the similarities end there. Also in the bowl with the seasoned chicken there is honey, chopped raisins and parsley. The mixture is formed into patties, fried, and served on a toasted roll. A fried egg and some Fontina cheese are stacked on top of the arrangement, with the cheese melted on the grill, and the ensemble topped with the remaining half of the bread roll.

The construction is relatively straightforward. Our only mishap came when the cheese broke the egg yolk of the fried egg, so we had a runny yolky eruption pouring down the side of the breadroll. Then the melted cheese slid off the egg surface, to make a pile of lardy fat on the baking sheet with the rapidly congealing egg yolk. Appetising this was not. The roll had no directions as to what it should be served with, so we served it all on its lonesome.

I may have mentioned before our general antipathy towards eggs, so we were not particularly excited at the prospect of this meal. We had hoped that the sausage part may be good enough to overule the egginess; alas it was not to be. The sweet savoury sausage thing just wasn’t a winner here. The fennel seemed overpowering, the chicken sausage too dry, and the raisins and honey just seemed out of place. After 6 years in the US, we can almost get our heads around putting maple syrup on breakfast bacon and sausage, if they are being eaten with pancakes, but it still seems weird. Ketchup on savoury, syrup on sweet; that’s the natural order of breakfast, to us at least. At least I can get behind the notion of the cooked breakfast, being British and thus a big fan of the fry-up (extra bacon, no eggs please). L has a hard time with cooked breakfasts, being more of a Continental guy; he’s cereal and yoghurt all the way. So this glorified sausage egg sandwich was not received terribly well. At all. I ate maybe half, L abandoned ship after a couple of bites. Baby A had a lucky escape earlier with a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. Being jealous of a baby is an ugly thing.

In all honesty, this just wasn’t nice. It tasted of junk food, with the sausage seasonings appearing like half-hearted attempts to elevate the dish to something greater. Unfortunately it never surpassed its egg sausage sandwich origins, and it was too messed around with to be appreciated as a straightforward breakfast dish. Neither fancy nor plain, this meal was one of the less successful ones. Let’s hope the Strip Steaks with a Side of Blue Cheese Spaghetti tomorrow are more successful. They certainly sound more promising, although I will be substituting the cheese of blue for something more pregnancy-friendly.

Speaking of pregnancy (my what a seamless segue), today we had what will probably be our final glimpse of Baby #2 while still on the inside. We went back for another 4D scan, so the doctor could use us as guinea pigs to refine his mad scanning skillz on the new ultrasound machine. It was good fun, the baby, still a girl, both stuck her tongue out and gave us the finger, which were memorable moments most certainly. She looks quite cute but seems to have a bit of a big nose. This assumption could perhaps have just been due to the angles and the background. Or maybe this child will actually have some of my genes. Baby A has been very lucky so far, let’s hope her sister is too.

In other news, we made a bit of headway on packing up our life today. I say we, but in fact L has commandeered the new Harry Potter book so he may have been somewhat preoccupied. As long as he finishes it soon so that I can read it, all will be forgiven. Particularly if he packs up everything else while I read. Very very slowly. I cleared out most of the dining room today, including our elaborate wooden built in sideboard buffet thing that we certainly won’t miss in the new house. It took us forever to find something to put in the glass windowed doors, given that we have no china or trinkets or anything remotely appropriate. So I laughed a little to myself when I labelled a box as “ornaments” when in fact it contained a bunch of Star Wars figures and an old Tonka truck. Classy we is, most certainly.

We had high hopes for feeding Fried Greens with Ham and Eggs to Baby A for her dinner tonight. However a combination of copious amounts of dribble, excessive grumpiness and crying, an upset stomach and three new teeth working their way in to her little mouth conspired against us. It’s been months since we had teething issues, but we appear to be in the throes of “one of those nights.” Generally she is asleep within 15 minutes of being put to bed, but tonight she’s still crying off and on an hour and a half later. Poor wee bairn. Suffice to say that we didn’t faff around cooking the dinner for her but cooked it after she went to bed. She got comfort food, which she still didn’t want to eat. So we’ll have to introduce her to the joys of the fried egg on a day when she’s feeling a little less sorry for herself and a little more receptive to new things.

The meal is very fast and easy to make. Slices of prosciutto are fried in copious amounts of olive oil (the recipe calls for 5 tablespoons worth at this point) until crispy, then set aside. Anchovies are melted into some more oil with some garlic and red pepper flakes. The greens are then wilted into the mixture, then seasoned with black pepper and nutmeg. Finally an egg is fried in yet more oil then served on top of the greens. The crumbled prosciutto and some chopped scallions garnish the dish.

I have to say that I didn’t partake in this meal, but L did. Rachael Ray says that it is a meal that is good for B,L or D (breakfast, lunch or dinner) but L felt this was really only a breakfast dish. He is not an egg eater, but said that if you like eggs, this is probably a winner. It’s quick, easy, spicy and salty, with some crunch coming from the prosciutto and spring onions. Tomorrow he will be having Swordfish Burgers with Lemon, Garlic, and Parsley, I don’t know what I’ll be having for my three dinners. I am firmly in the stage of pregnancy where I am starving all the time. I am eating a small to medium size meal every couple of hours. My appetite is absolutely insatiable. I don’t know what to eat, but it has to be something. So much for not putting on a ton of weight this time round.

This evening we spent the best part of an hour attempting to craft Crab Tortilla (Egg Pie) and Shredded Plantain Hash Browns. This meal is a fry up, if ever there was one; I added gallons of olive oil in the course of the cooking. The egg pie (mmm sounds so appetising) begins with green pepper, onion, celery and pre-shredded hash brown potatoes being chopped in the food processor. I didn’t think it made a great deal of sense to bother to buy a bag of hash brown potatoes, only to put them in the food processor, but maybe I’m just being picky. Now we have lots of potential hash brown meals to make with the remainder of the bag. The vegetables were supposed to be finely chopped, which they were, but they were also so wet that they were the consistency of mushed up cucumber. No matter how much oil I used, the vegetables just soaked it up and stuck to the bottom of the (non-stick) pan. Chopping by hand would have been much more successful. A mixture of egg, cream and hot sauce was poured into the pan, and swirled around with the mushy vegetables. At this point it resembled a deep, pale green, lumpy omelette. The crab was mixed with Old Bay seasoning and poured on top of the egg, and sort of mixed in a bit.

Meanwhile, L shredded the green plantain and grated an onion into the bowl. Some flour and salt and pepper were added, and the mixture was formed into hash browns and fried. Back to the egg pie, I had a feeling that the mush was sticking to the bottom of the pan, so I called L in for backup. He flipped the egg mixture onto a plate without burning himself, which I thought was pretty impressive. Unfortunately the “golden” part of the omelette was stuck to the bottom of the pan. More oil and a switch of frying pans later, we attempted to cook the egg pie again. It would not stick to itself, only to the pan, despite our words of tender loving encouragement. Eventually we cut it down in size so that we could add copious amounts of oil and turn up the heat to brown the bottom. All roads led to disater; photogenic this meal is not.

Eventually we ended up with a lump of something that didn’t seem raw, and we served it with the hash browns and fruit salsa. It looked like we’d cut out part of a winter sweater and fried it, and served it with some fried carpet. It tasted almost as good. Both elements tasted raw, and each was as unappetising as the other. The omelette was like a hash brown fishy egg hybrid, only really badly made. I’ll concede that we may have messed this up somehow, but this is a lot of hassle for some fried things. Why not fry the hash brown potato mix and serve it with an omelette? Just a suggestion.

At least this was funny. It was so vile it was amusing. And now the condo smells of fried eggy fish. Which is marginally less offensive than Baby A’s post-operative breath. Tomorrow we will be making Bacon-Makes-It-Better Corn Chowder with Tomato and Ricotta Salata Salad. Sounds like an improvement on todays effort.

Eggs-traordinary Spanish Style Stuffed Toasty Baskets with Lemony Greens was eggs-tremely unappetising, eggs-traspecially rubbish, eggs-actly what we didn’t want to cook or eat. Yes, the bacon was exchanged for chorizo, and pimento stuffed olives were placed on the top. Still not Spanish food, still not good. Nobody wanted to touch this meal.

Moving on, tomorrow we make Halibut Soup. I’m hoping that my preconceptions are all wrong, and that the fishy soup will indeed be fabulous. Please, pretty please.

This afternoon, the egg-shy adults cooked Eggs-traordinary Stuffed Toasty Baskets with Lemony Greens for Baby A who is too little to share our extreme anti-egg prejudices. As I mentioned earlier, L is allergic to eggs and I just really, really don’t like them. I can eat them scrambled or in an omelette, but I cannot stomach poached or hard boiled eggs. Or, more specifically, the egg yolk prepared in such a fashion makes me queasy. This dish was thus never destined to be a great hit in this family, but perhaps if it was easy to make and Baby A enjoyed it, we could adopt it into our repertoire.

Let’s surmise by saying that’s never going to happen. To be honest, this meal is ridiculous. Rachael Ray says it is good for B, L or D,- breakfast, lunch or dinner. Only if you really aren’t hungry. As an enormous contrast to every meal we’ve made so far, this meal was comparatively tiny. One egg is oven baked inside a squashed slice of white bread stuffed in a muffin tin, topped with fried tomato, bacon, onion, garlic, red pepper flakes and cheese. This is just too labour-intensive for the end result. If the egg was poached and the skillet was used to fry up a mountain of bacon and tomatoes, that I could understand. Rather, the sorry little egg in a muffin cup was served with a dressed green salad.

I tried some of the dish, and it was just rubbish. Unless you were desperately trying to impress someone with your egg-cooking-prowess for a fancy brunch, this is just not worth it. Baby A started dinner by trying to throw her plate of food on the floor. After some coaxing, she could be persuaded to try some of the meal. In fairness she did eat a couple of mouthfuls, and seemed reasonably content. Then she had some egg yolk, gagged, and refused to eat any more. Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree after all.

Unfortunately, tomorrow we get to make it again, with chorizo instead of bacon, and topped with olives for Eggs-traordinary Spanish Style Stuffed Toasty Baskets with Lemony Greens. Maybe I can work on perfecting my stuffing a flattened slice of processed bread into a greased muffin tin skills. Who knows when this technique may come in handy? Think of all the things you could stuff inside a Toasty Basket. Chicken sausage, chopped chicken breasts, chicken thighs, chicken stuffing. The options are endless

A scrambled egg sandwich, even when called a scramblewich, is not a particularly exciting or adventurous dinner choice to herald the beginning of the new year. Knowing that L was not willing to spend the evening in an egg-allergy induced illness, and that Baby A is currently more interested in climbing out of the high chair rather than actually eating dinner, I scaled the recipe down to serve one baby and one adult rather than four big people. In its favor, the meal was pretty easy to make and took way less than 30 minutes to cook. Essentially, some deli ham was fried in butter; eggs with hot sauce, salt and pepper and a splash of milk were scrambled with the ham. The mixture was tipped into a hollowed out baguette, topped with cheese and put under the broiler. After escaping from the brand new, shiny-clean cookie sheet and hanging around in the back of the oven for a while, the food was extracted and topped with chopped chives.