Cooking for Cheats - Poached Egg Over Ham and Toast

My kitchen has seen a fair bit of activity lately.

with JJ taking up most of my time and no additional help, i now have even lesser time for chores and caring for the household.
since i breastfeed, nutrition is a major concern. i didn't want to resort to reaching for chips and cookies to curb my hunger pangs, so i have been on the prowl for speedy recipes that put food on the table in less than 20 minutes.

i have always been a fan of simple, straightforward cooking because anything that takes more than 5 ingredients and longer than an hour to prepare is really best eaten at a restaurant.

these days, in addition to taste and speed, the amount of time needed for cleaning up after has become another important requirement when i cook.

meals that taste great, cook easy and clean up fast after are certainly not easy to prepare, but i realise that with a little bit of cheating, the challenge becomes pretty enjoyable.

i have been wondering about eggs benedict ever since i saw them on television, but in my present state there would certainly be no pottering around the kitchen for hollandaise sauce.

so my curiosity led me to make the best of whatever i had in the fridge, and the results were fast, dead simple and very delicious.

1. i started by toasting two slices of bread while browning two slices of ham in a frypan.

2. in a small pot filled two-thirds with water, i added a tablespoon of vinegar when the water came to a boil and reduced the boil to a gentle simmer.

3. after cracking an egg into a bowl, i gently slid the egg into the pot of water before covering the pot and waiting for four minutes.

4. i then stacked the ham on top of my toast, and topped it with my poached egg.

with some freshly cracked black pepper, this made a quick and yummy breakfast!

Note to Self

2013 has come and gone, and we've all succeeded in rolling over into a new year.

this year i won't be making any (lofty/ambitious/unrealistic) promises or resolutions, but i would really want to remind myself to love my family.
put more specifically, to love each and every one of my near and dear ones as equally as possible.

put even more specifically, to love my husband every day of our days together and not have the daily grind eat away at the foundation that was us, before JJ came into the picture.

the married-with-kids will probably know what I'm getting at.

once a baby comes into the picture, a husband is somehow relegated to the bench.
he becomes the one-with-the-heavy-diaper-bag, the why-arent-you-doing-as-much-as-i-am part of the marriage.

it's all very sad, so i swore to myself when i was pregnant that i won't be one of those who ended up relentlessly picking on her husband post-baby.

but i fell into the same rut.
i would very much like to blame it on my changing body shape, postpartum hormones, the fact that we now have a screaming infant in the house, but there really isn't a good enough reason for constantly finding fault with your own husband.

i realised how monstrous i had become last christmas, when i was searching for JJ's lost sock and my eyes wandered over to the foot of the christmas tree, where ken had left a present for me.

i used to be the one with the surprises, but last year, i bought ken's birthday gift 5 months ahead and handed it to him at the shop register, and i neither planned nor did anything for our wedding anniversary and christmas.
i became icy and snappy, and ken was made the convenient victim of all my thorns and prickles.
the baby had become the excuse for my forgetting our marriage, and his gift made me remember.

it reminded me that we existed before JJ, and our love is the reason why JJ ever made it into the picture in the first place.

so this year, this monster of a wife will try to be nicer. there will be no equating the number of times he changes JJ's diaper to how much he loves me. there will also be no faulting him for not being home more because of work.

and if the husband wants five eggs in his breakfast omelette, so be it.