Baked breakfast tomatoes with duck eggs

I had this dish near Tarragona in Spain years ago as a starter for a monumental dinner that went on from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., but I thought it would make a great breakfast dish. You can use fresh, over-ripe tomatoes or a can of chopped tomatoes for this.

2 tbsp olive oil plus a little more for drizzling
1 medium onion, peeled and finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
2 x 400g cans of good-quality chopped tomatoes, or 1kg skinned ripe tomatoes
a couple of sprigs of thyme
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 English muffins, halved
4 duck eggs

Heat the olive oil in a heavy-based saucepan and gently cook the onion and garlic for 2-3 minutes until soft. Add the tomatoes and thyme, season and simmer gently for 30 minutes, stirring every so often.

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Lightly toast the muffins on both sides and lay in an oven-proof dish. Pour over the tomatoes, then crack an egg on to each muffin. Bake in the oven for about 8-10 minutes or until the eggs are just cooked.

Serve immediately, drizzled with some olive oil.

So, you don’t like Wagner?

I first heard Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde nearly 30 years ago, hadn’t much of a clue what was going on, but the music gripped me like nothing else has ever done. I got to know all the mature operas very well, over time, but now many moons can pass by without hearing a note. However, once I almost reluctantly, and even with resistance, put one of his great dramas in the CD player, I am swept away all over again.

It’s intoxicating, heady, almost dangerous stuff, but that feeling of being swept away is like nothing else in all music.

I don’t care about Wagner’s family, his character, his beliefs, or what he liked for breakfast. I only care about the works. For me, they’re the greatest and most intense theatre pieces that I know, fathomless, inextinguishable and indestructible. I’ve seen them done superbly well and excruciatingly badly, and I regret more than I can say all the thousands of productions that I never saw and never shall see.

Many contemporary performances of Wagner seem wilfully to flout his intentions to the point where the music and theatre are almost divorced from one another. An “historically informed” production would be an interesting idea (as long as the orchestra also made use of gut strings, etc.) but it’s also worth bearing in mind that Wagner himself was a progressive thinker (at least concerning music and drama) who probably would not have approved of the petrification of his legacy begun by Cosima and continued by their descendants.

The question is whether whatever continuing relevance Wagner’s work has to other times and places is best served by attempting to reproduce his explicit instructions or not. For example, the action of Der Ring des Nibelungen takes place in a kind of mythical primeval past where time is only measured by the events of the story. Is this “timelessness” best expressed by using the pseudo-mediaeval trappings of its early productions? Or do we now have a different idea for what “timeless” might mean? (Wieland Wagner, for example, used the model of Greek tragedy.)

I wonder how many people, on hearing any piece of music for the first time, respond to anything other than the music itself? I bet they don’t usually go around asking whether the composer had beliefs they find repugnant, beat his wife, did even worse things to other people, had his music hijacked by other people who used it for nefarious ends, was a murderer, swindler, you name it … Obviously, if you start looking into the situation further you may well find out that sort of thing, but I doubt that initially it would colour your appreciation of any artist.

The Greggs Adventure

Greggs, Piccadilly Station, Manchester

The Greggs Adventure is a food blog by Jim Groome. He describes it thus:

A long-running series in which I review every sandwich and pastry sold by Greggs.

Greggs has been around for as long as you’ve been alive. Always there on the high street ready to offer sandwiches, soup, buns, whatever. You’ve had a Greggs lunch at least once in your life. It’s earned something of a dodgy reputation due to the, ahem, varied quality of the food on offer. I realised one day that I really had no idea what’s good and what’s not good at Greggs. This blog is my attempt to change that.

What more can I say? Visit this blog, it’s excellent!

Black pudding sandwich

This is a version of the Fernandez and Wells sandwich that I would scoff for breakfast when I worked near Soho, in London, years ago. The quality of the black pudding is crucial as that cardboard-like stuff with the texture of sawdust just won’t work.

8 baps or rolls or barmcakes or 8 slices of sourdough
softened butter
6 duck eggs, boiled for 5 minutes, then refreshed in cold water and peeled
4-6 tbsp top quality mayonnaise
salt and freshly ground black pepper
400-450g top quality black pudding
vegetable or corn oil for frying

Slice the black pudding into 1cm thick slices if they are the large cylinder types or into 2 or 3 lengthways if they are the Bury-style puddings.

Chop the duck eggs and mix with a good amount of mayonnaise and season well. Pan-fry the black pudding for about 2-3 minutes on each side.

Spread the butter on to the bread then spoon the egg mayonnaise on to one half with the black pudding on top and the other half of the bread on top.

Give the bread a light toasting on each side and serve.

Falling Down

The “I want breakfast” scene from Joel Schumacher’s excellent 1993 film is probably the one most people remember, although there are funnier and more powerful scenes (I’m thinking of Michael Douglas’s first encounter with the Hispanic gang members, or his visit to the army surplus store).

I’m sure the reason this particular scene is so famous is that every person in the world who has ever eaten at a restaurant where there are pictures of the food on the menu can identify with it.

What makes it memorable for me is the outrageous scene-stealing performance of Dedee Pfeiffer (Michelle’s younger sister) as Sheila the Whammyburger waitress. I wonder whether she was asked to play the part this way. Anyway, just watch her.