A Breakfast to Fall in Love For

Transformation is a good thing, right?

Certainly change is uncomfortable and the disruption of our homeostasis is something that humans in general are not pleased with, but the grass is sometimes greener on the other side, yeah?

Well I'm not necessarily here to talk about the philosophy, psychology, or pathology of mental and physical metamorphosis, but I feel like it's an apt way to get the point of my first post on a new platform across.

Speaking of metamorphosis, I have been feeling quite "Gregor Samsa" recently. A job opportunity I really wanted fell through, and through some standard but quite obfuscatory corporate restructuring at my current job, I am now parked in a position where the vast majority of my job is about as compelling as macrodata refinement-just call me Keegan R. at this point. Needless to say, between the incessant babbling of my Outlook notifications and the numbers, the horrible, horrible numbers, I often wake up feeling like an enormous cockroach stuck on my back with my many appendages helplessly wriggling above me.

Maybe some change, albeit small, in whatever way, could be good. The platform change is a good place to start, but there had to be something else.

Then I had an idea.

Breakfast.

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Breakfast is super meaningful to me and I realized that I hadn't actually been cooking like I wanted to. So long have I just dragged whatever I could out of the pantry or fridge and make sustenance. No that's not right. Breakfast is about enjoying the world. To greet the new dawn or day by indulging your ultimate epicurean sensation of flavor and joy. Breakfast is the perfect meal where savory nutrition and sweet indulgence meld together flawlessly.

I used to be relatively (in)famous for my breakfasts. When I was in college and graduate school, I had a reputation for being one of very few men that would cook breakfast the morning after any late nights. Be it from the occasional romantic rendezvous or from a gathering with friends. It wasn't ever a performative thing either, I honestly just love pancakes and eggs. Fact of the matter is, if you were lucky enough to be around me at breakfast, you'd get to enjoy mine.

In the least humble and most brag way possible, I have had no fewer than four women at some point in my life, essentially profess their eternal and undying love for me because of the breakfast I made.

So I sought to reclaim that for my own sake.

Who wants to learn pancakes and eggs, the Keegan way?

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Peanut Butter Cup Pancakes and a Soft-Scrambled Crostini Trio (The Keegan Way)

My favorite thing about this breakfast is how simple it is with respect to the number of ingredients. So the mise en place is exceedingly easy.

Pancakes are simple: dry ingredients and wet ingredients are mixed separately, combined, and the batter is ready to go.

For the dry, it's just going to be flour, baking soda, pinch of cream of tartar, a touch of granulated sugar, a couple scratches of a cinnamon stick for that home-cooked flair and bittersweet cocoa powder for that rich chocolate warmth and the beautiful deep color of our "cup".

For the wet, we're using buttermilk, butter, milk, the tiniest bit of vanilla extract-not to add flavor, but to enhance the others-and an egg. Buttermilk is super important, because when it's mixed with baking soda, the batter generates carbon dioxide gas which is driven off while cooking on a hot pan. These little pockets of gas trying to escape through the batter make the final pancake super light and fluffy.

Whisk all that together and voila- the chocolate pancake batter is done.

But what's going to do a lot of heavy lifting are the peanut butter chips. The same way people use chocolate chips to get melty chocolate flavor in their pancakes, I use Reece's chips. I'm not ordinarily a brand shill by any stretch of the imagination, but for this, you have got to use the brand name.

Now the batter for the cakes is done, lets move to our crostini.

Mise en place here is even simpler. These eggs are extraordinarily simple but elegant. For the crostini themselves, I use a basic French baguette. I take off a few thin slices and bake at a moderate temperature like 350 degrees Fahrenheit (which is about 180 Celsius for the rest of the planet, 453 K for all you physicists). for a couple minutes. Just enough to warm it up and get the middle nice and pliable.

After the initial bake, then I grate a little bit of cheese on top and broil it for one to two minutes to melt in. Here, I used sharp cheddar. I prefer harder, sharper, and nuttier cheeses for these crostini, because the egg is a much smoother, creamier, and softer texture and flavor, so I wanted to play with those dynamics a bit. A softer cheese isn't bad per se, I would just find the dish to have less depth of flavor.

Now it's just the matter of preparing the eggs. Which is slightly easier said than done.

There's a sort of urban legend in the culinary world, that in order to get a job at an amazing restaurant, the first test is to prepare an egg.

Now you might think that's simple, yeah?

But it goes deeper than that. Yes, you could make Waffle House-tier hard scrambles designed to be drowned in hot sauce, or East Coast diner American omelets with a dubiously browned bottom with all kinds of cheese and veggies thrown at it to hide how milquetoast and blasé the egg truly is. It takes something special to make the egg the star of it's own dish-and that is what the chef is looking for in the test.

That's what we're going to do here.

So in the strangest setup you've ever seen an egg cooked in before, you'll take a cold pan and add three eggs and a knob of butter. It is absolutely vital that this is all that has been added.

Eggs are a sort of biological miracle, physically speaking. The yolk, which is fatty, is completely surrounded by a watery white stuffed to the gills with protein. It's why when you scramble eggs with a whisk, you can't ever get it perfectly homogenous without introducing a bunch of air bubbles. Fat and water and to a certain extent, protein, all hate each other, which is why we use butter to our advantage.

Butter is already a fatty emulsion, so as it melts in the presence of both water and fat at high temperatures, it clings everything together.

So jack the heat all the way to high and use a cake spatula scramble, scramble, scramble. As soon as egg starts to come together and solidify as is cooks on the bottom of the pan, pick the pan up off the heat, continue scrambling, and stir until the temperature has evened out and it requires more heat. Repeat this three to four more times until the eggs are just all pulled together.

Now you can add the accoutrements. First, a dash of some cool dairy to stop the cooking and make sure the eggs don't dry out. You can use creme anglaise, creme fraise, mascarpone, whipping cream, a sprinkle of melty cheese, or even a dash of milk in a pinch. Finally, salt and a couple cracks of black pepper over the top. It's critical that the eggs are cooked before salt is added, because it can change the osmolality of the white and make the eggs separate and dry really extensively in the pan during cooking. I also sprinkle some homemade everything bagel seasoning (cue Ina Garten voice, "but store bought is fine too") and just a couple final stirs to get everything incorporated.

Then it's time to construct.

I stack two pancakes and tops with a small sliver of unsalted butter and a small drizzle of my favorite New Hampshire maple syrup.

A little bit of my soft egg scramble tops each of my toasted crostini and I arrange three per plate to make a silly looking ninja star design. Final garnish is a tiny touch of gochugaru flakes to cut through that dairy fattiness with a teeny bit of spice and acid.

It's everything I could want and more. Texturally, it's a dream and the flavors are all layered but not excessively so. It gives elevated comfort breakfast. It's easy to eat, it's casual, it's whimsical, and it's so wonderfully satisfying that I don't ever go for seconds. I remember all at once why I love it and why so many others must too.

So tell me:

Do you love me in that Kafkaesque way yet?