April 17: Shirred Eggs with Toast and Homemade Hash Brown Potatoes

For a lazy Sunday breakfast, we decided to make an easy egg recipe along with some homemade hash browns. Paul peeled and grated two russet potatoes to start the hash browns.

Paul is a lovely sous-chef.

We had read online that the key to making crispy hash browns is to get as much moisture out of the potatoes as possible before beginning to cook them. We found a great suggestion -- to use a ricer to extra the extra moisture out of the already-grated potatoes.

We have officially used the ricer...twice. Yay!

While Paul started cooking the hash browns, after heating up a little vegetable oil in the frying pan, then added the grated, drained potatoes.

 

I greased the ramekins with a little olive oil, then began adding the ingredients.

I grated Gruyere cheese and chopped some shallots to add to the egg. I just pulled the leaves off the thyme sprigs and added them to the ramekins.

You can just toss everything into the ramekin, and add the cream on top. The ramekins go into the oven preheated to 425 degrees for 7 to 10 minutes, depending on how goopy you want your egg yolks to be. 

All the ingredients, minus the all-important heavy cream.

We like a goopy yolk, so I pulled them out of the oven at about 8 minutes. The eggs do continue to cook/set, so you're going to want to eat them relatively quickly if you don't want them to harden up further. The whites are cooked all the way through, but are nice and soft.


  We ate the eggs with some toast, which is great for sopping up any leftover egg bits, particularly in a metal ramekin.



I definitely burned my mouth trying to eat this before it had cooled a little. The price of deliciousness. And impatience.

I really like this dish. I chose to scoop the egg out and spread it on the toast. It's quite easy to make (the egg part, at least) and cooks super quickly. I love the shallot/Gruyere/thyme combination, but I imagine you could do pretty much any cheese and diced vegetable and be pretty happy. I think the tablespoon of cream makes it a little decadent without totally going crazy.

We did try the recipe again in smaller, ceramic ramekins. We had to adjust the cooking time a little to make sure the yolks weren't too runny. I liked the eggs better in the smaller ramekins because they were a little thicker -- and I didn't give myself the willies scraping a metal fork against a metal ramekin.

We're going to try a scoop of fruit preserves with some goat cheese to see if it works for sweet flavors as well. Stay tuned!