A beautiful spiral loaf, fresh poached eggs and anchovies cheer up a soggy morning.

Well, today has been about as wet as wet can be, even a wet Wednesday in November, and it’s only the August Bank Holiday. On days like this, trudging up to the hen houses to check that they’re all ok and let them out for a bit of free ranging is a bit, well, soggy, and it’s only cheered by two little eggs, still hot from their mother, sitting in the boxes, waiting for breakfast time. And the only way to deal with a bank holiday this wet is to make a glorious breakfast.

It starts with jolly good bread.

red spiral loaf

This is Claire Sutton’s wonderful creation, and I shall leave the genius herself to explain the recipe. Needless to say, it’s my favourite show-off bread as it makes me look like a much more impressive baker than I am.

spiral loaf
spiral loaf
spiral loaf
spiral loaf

You can make the bread redder by adding more tomato purée and paprika, but the amount I added means it has just enough flavour without it being overwhelming. The chilli flakes add a nice little kick, but not too much of one for it to be overwhelming as a breakfast bread, which is what I’m using it for (well, and lunch and supper and snacks and everything else).

sliced chilli loaf

chilli tomato bread

The great thing about having your own chickens is that the eggs are so, so easy to poach. Gone are the days when I added vinegar and made whirlpools and hoped for the best and still ended up with a separate yolk orbiting a shredded mass of white protein in the pan. No, fresh eggs have a strong white structure that only starts to disintegrate after a few days. And if your egg is still warm from the hen. then you know you’re not going to have any trouble poaching at all. All I do now is bring a pan of water to the boil, crack the eggs into it, set a timer running for a minute while the water continues to boil, then after a minute take the pan off the heat to sit for another minute. Then I fish the eggs out and serve. This is for runny yolks: for hard yolks I boil for two minutes and sit for two minutes, but who wants a hard-yolked egg, anyway?

poached eggs poached eggs

To make this the best breakfast ever, I add an anchovy paste, made simply by whizzing all the anchovy fillets in one tin in a blender with a tablespoon of olive oil, and spreading thickly on the bread. It’s better on toast, but the bread is too nice to toast when it’s fresh.

eggs anchovies

Ahh, the way the rich, orange yolk combines with the anchovies is just divine. Eggy fishiness: simple foodie heaven. And there we have it: a gorgeous start to a wet Bank Holiday Monday.

eggs anchovy paste

P.S. don’t forget to follow our recipe series on using up eggs here.

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