Red Eyes

Hey all,

I invented these little guys over the weekend while in South Dakota for Taylor's wedding. He put us up with a family friend, Sandra. She was outrageously hospitable, providing beds for seven (!) of us guys (including Ryan, from whom I stole all of these pictures) and filling her fridge with food and beer for us. She treated us like family, which was wonderful.

On Saturday morning we took it upon ourselves to host a breakfast get together. After having stayed up until two or three in the morning drinking beers and telling stories we dragged ourselves out of bed at eight and got to work on food. We had some pancakes, which were tasty but I'm not sure what (if any) recipe was used. There was a fruit salad which is below even my standards for what can be written up on a cooking blog. My contribution was Red Eyes, which I guess I came up with. However, they are based heavily on One Eyes, taught to me by Pokey.

They are simple but very tasty.

Ingredients:

9	English muffins
8	eggs (approx)
3	roma tomatoes
	butter
	salt
	pepper
	milk

Procedure:

Crack your eggs into a measuring cup. It's important that you be able to pour well out of it. You can do the eggs however you want, I guess, but I added a few splooshes of milk (perhaps 2 oz total) and a lot of salt and pepper. Then whisk them.

Using a butter knife, cut the center out of each muffin (to make them look like rings). The hole should be just barely larger around than a roma tomato. The larger the hole, the tastier it will be, but also the more fragile. Then carefully pull the muffins in half and butter the formerly inside half.

The muffin holes can be toasted and eaten with butter and jam or whatever. They are English muffins, after all.



Slice the tomatoes into a few dozen slices. You'll have 18 half-muffins and each one should get a slice or two of tomato.

Heat some butter in a pan. Put an english muffin in, butter side down (yeah, that's a lot of butter. Don't worry about it. It's good for you. Pour in egg until the hole in the muffin is about half full.



Now, this is a bit trickier than you might suspect. The muffin has a rough bottom so the egg will try to escape. The trick I found to work best was having a very hot pan, then slowly pouring in egg with one hand while using a few fingers of the other hand to press the muffin flat against the pan. Once the bottom layer of egg solidifies you're safe to pour in more.

After letting that cook for a bit add in a slice or two of tomato to the cavity. Fill any remaining space with egg to try to keep the tomato from escaping. Cook the egg through. This will require you to flip the muffin, though it's unclear precisely when it's best to do this. They tend to not look that pretty in any case, so I'd just not worry about appearances and just flip it as soon as you build up the confidence.

You can serve these with salsa or plain. Despite having so few ingredients they are very tasty. They're more of an appetizer than a meal so it's hard to say how many servings this makes. A handful.

I would have really liked to put avocado in these with the tomato. However, we did not because Taylor is allergic and we felt it would not be appropriate to kill him on the morning of his wedding day.

Cheese may also have been nice. I would probably put it on top of the bottom layer of egg but under the tomato so that it's sort of a surprise (rather than being a visible garnish type feel on top).