Dumb luck poached eggs

There are very few dishes that remind me of home. My mom didn't really cook, although she recently tried to argue this point by reminding me that she put a chicken in the crock pot almost every week, and between that and her infamous creamed tuna on toast, who was I to continue claiming I grew up in a culinary wasteland of TV dinners and PB&J's made with diet jelly product?

Still, my memories remain. And one of the only  meals I remember fondly from my childhood kitchen are poached eggs. For whatever reason, my mom had the secret of making them, and every so often when she had the time she would spoon them out over crisp English muffins for us, to our great delight.

Because of that, I am often the only one at the diner to order Eggs Benedict, so I can get a couple of egg, poached by a professional and smothered in Hollandaise sauce, over English muffins, with some forbidden Canadian bacon thrown in for extra pleasure.

These eggs have been on my mind lately. I've been coming across scandalously good-looking photos of poached eggs; I've been stumbling on recipes; essays on the egg, and so on. Wednesday, with the nits at their dad's and out of all the usual breakfast foodstuffs (Jack, in his profound late-summer boredom, ate an entire container of blueberries the day before), I tried my hand at the simple-but-often-vexing poached egg.

No recipe, just some vague memories of how it's done. I did quickly peruse Deb's take on how to poach an egg on her blog, Smitten Kitchen, and took her advice to drop a dollop of vinegar into my water. Not sure why that's important, but if she does it I can only blindly follow. Be warned: Her photos are Triple X food porn.

The results, as you can see above, were quite pleasing. Now if I had had better bread, and not Van de Camp's faux wheat loaf left over from beach camping, and some freshly picked tomatoes to go on the side, it could have been a memory. Better still if I could be sure of my ability to do it again, maybe for the kids, and make a memory for them. But that would be asking for too much. So I sat in my sunny kitchen and enjoyed the meal, and the quiet, and thanked the goddess of poached eggs for watching over me.