I am not, by instinct, a morning person. Although I can, with a deadline looming and the threat of redundancy hanging over me, manage to get up before 10am. I can wake up only in increments – it takes me a good hour or so before I can manage anything as complex as eating, and even then, it has to be very simple: toast, perhaps, or an innocuous cereal.
So I was immediately suspicious of Oprah’s famous “sexy breakfast” recipe because, as far as I’m concerned, the only sexy breakfast is a) prepared by someone else and b) happens after 10am.
Nonetheless, as it is the most famous of the recipes in her cookbook Food, Health and Happiness, at least according to three very confident-sounding people on the internet, I decided I had no choice but to make it.
Oprah’s “sexy breakfast” is scrambled eggs with a salsa of serrano peppers, jalapeño chillies, onion, garlic and tomatoes, plus “truffle zest”. I read once that as you get older, you become more set in your ways, and one aspect of that is I am increasingly suspicious of people who eat eggs. As far as I am concerned, eggs are an ingredient, not a food. I feel the same way about someone who voluntarily eats an egg as I do about someone who eats, say, cornflour: I know it’s not doing them any harm, but I cannot persuade myself it is doing them any good, either.
My suspicions are only heightened when I realise how involved scrambled eggs are: you have to beat them, fold them, and generally mollycoddle them. And that’s before you’ve made the salsa.
Then there’s the difficult question of the truffle zest. I know what truffles are, I know what zest is, but I am not entirely sure what “truffle zest” is, and neither are my local supermarkets. Has something perhaps been lost in translation over the Atlantic? Online, I find out it’s an expensive powdered truffle condiment, and shell out for some.
I don’t know if the resulting breakfast is any good, but it certainly wasn’t worth the hassle. Next time I want a “sexy breakfast”, I’ll stick to toast.
