Morning food and brunch plates: eggs, pancakes, toasted breads, sit-down dishes that pair with coffee. From poached eggs and hollandaise to buttermilk pancakes and banana bread; cooking ranges from five-minute weekday rituals to weekend project plates.
Silky scrambled eggs infused with warm spices and fresh aromatics. The turmeric adds a earthy golden color while ginger and chilli provide warmth and complexity. Served with fresh coriander, this makes an excellent quick snack, elegant starter, or gourmet canapé topping.
Split mung beans (the green hulled kind) soak optionally 4 hours (cuts cooking time in half but not essential). Beans simmer in water with knotted pandan leaves, sliced ginger and a pinch of salt for 35-45 minutes until soft and split. Palm sugar dissolves in; cooks another 5 minutes. To serve: ladle into bowls; pour thick warm coconut milk over the top. Optional toppings: a sprinkle of fried shallots, a spoon of toasted black sesame, or chunks of toasted sweet bread (the Surabaya street-cart way).
Tall, soft, caramel-coloured pancakes that pour into the kind of weekend breakfast you don't rush. You whisk the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet (buttermilk, eggs, melted butter, a thread of vanilla) in another, then combine briefly and stop while lumps are still visible. Smooth batter develops gluten and gives you chewy, dense rounds rather than the cloud-soft stack you're after. Ten minutes' rest lets the baking powder and bicarb start working with the buttermilk's acid, which is where the lift comes from. You cook them on a medium-low pan with a small knob of butter, and you flip when bubbles dot the surface and the edges look set. Stack three high, drown in butter and maple syrup, scatter berries if there are any in the fridge. Sunday breakfast, slow morning, second pot of coffee.
Chinese scallion pancakes (actually made without scallions here, though they can be added) are a revelation: thin, crispy-edged, tender dough that separates perfectly into two layers. The method is clever, dough balls are paired, one brushed with sesame oil, then flattened together and cooked, allowing steam to create separation. The result is restaurant-quality pancakes that are thin enough to be delicate yet crispy enough to hold their shape. They're excellent with any Asian meal or served plain as a snack.
A quick béchamel goes onto two slices of bread, ham fills the middle, more béchamel and grated gruyère pile on top. Bakes in a hot oven until the cheese melts into a deep golden crust.
The Sunday brunch icon, and the dish people learn hollandaise for. You build the sauce first, whisking egg yolks with water and lemon over a bain-marie until they ribbon, then drizzling in warm clarified butter while you whisk steady and even until the bowl holds something glossy and thick. The hollandaise will wait for you in a warm spot while you poach the eggs - vinegar in barely-simmering water, a gentle whirlpool, three minutes for a runny yolk - and toast the muffins, and warm the ham. Then everything stacks at speed: muffin, ham, egg, hollandaise spooned generously over, a scatter of chives. You eat immediately, because every component is at its best within a minute of plating and falls off a cliff after five. Looks fancy on a tablecloth; rewards twenty focused minutes of work.
Vegetables (spinach, courgette, peas, anything) cook in an oven-proof pan with onion. Beaten eggs with parmesan, herbs and seasoning pour over; the bottom sets on the hob, the top finishes under a hot grill until just puffed.
A Full English is a coordination exercise more than a recipe. You're cooking eight different things on one or two pans and they all need to land on the plate hot. The order below front-loads the slow items (sausages, chips) and finishes with the fast ones (eggs, fried bread) so the slowest things have a chance to rest while the quickest are still in the pan.
Hollandaise is the simplest of the mother sauces in ingredients, the trickiest in technique. It is an emulsion: tiny droplets of fat (the butter) suspended in a stable matrix held by an emulsifier (the egg yolks' lecithin). Add the butter too fast or let the eggs overheat, and the emulsion breaks: the sauce separates into a greasy puddle with a curdled scramble at the bottom.
A silky classic French mother sauce showcasing the art of emulsification. Egg yolks whisked with reduced vinegar create a luxuriously smooth sauce enriched with clarified butter, forming the foundation for countless derivative sauces and elegant presentations.
Huevos rancheros is a classic Mexican breakfast dish featuring eggs poached in a rich, spiced tomato sauce with peppers and chillies. This rustic, flavourful dish is traditionally served with warm tortillas for scooping, allowing diners to customize their own wraps. The combination of runny egg yolks with the thick, delicious tomato stew creates a truly memorable dish.
Well-fermented sour kimchi is chopped fine; the juice is reserved. A batter of plain flour, an egg, water and kimchi juice is mixed thin (consistency of pancake batter). Kimchi and chopped spring onion are stirred in. Half the batter is poured into a hot oiled pan, spread thin, fried for 4 minutes; flipped with a confident wrist or a wide spatula; fried another 3 minutes. Cut into wedges; eaten with soy-vinegar dip.
Floury potatoes grate fine; onion grates fine; both squeeze in a tea towel to remove water (the water-squeeze is what gives crisp latkes). Mixed with egg, matzo meal (or flour), salt and pepper. Dropped by spoonfuls into hot oil; flattened with a spatula; fried for 3-4 minutes per side till deep gold. Drained on a rack. Served hot with sour cream and applesauce.
A boiling-water dough rests until pliable. Each piece rolls thin into a long rectangle, gets a brush of sesame oil, salt, and a generous sprinkle of sliced scallions. Rolling the rectangle into a log and coiling it into a spiral creates the laminated layers. The spiral flattens to a disc and pan-fries in a thin slick of oil until each side is deep gold with crispy frilled edges.
A pepper-and-onion sofrito is seasoned with cumin, paprika and chilli, then simmered down with chopped tomatoes into a thick sauce. Eggs are cracked into wells in the sauce, the pan is covered, and they poach gently in the steam until the whites are set and the yolks still runny.