FESTIVE BREAKFASTS:Christmas breakfast must smell so wonderful it is worth going out just to come in and inhale, writes Tom Doorley
IF WEEKEND BREAKFASTS are, ideally, leisurely affairs spent lingering over the newspapers and imbibing a great deal of good coffee, the Christmas breakfast must surely require a little bit of attention to make it special? Or do I mean decadent? Yes, what the hell. Decadent. It's only once a year.
Okay, decadence is taken as read. But it needs to be easy and pretty quick to prepare. And it needs to lay a good foundation because if you have a suitably solid start to the day there will be no need to eat again until Christmas dinner in the early evening.
But the first thing, in our household, is a pot of very strong coffee, freshly ground and plunged, which will be blended with lots of hot, frothed milk. The girls prefer hot chocolate, so one of them will make the real thing from scratch, melting dark chocolate and whisking like mad. We get through a lot of milk on Christmas morning.
The final duty of a proper Christmas breakfast is it must smell so wonderful that it is worth going out for a short walk just to come in again and sniff the kitchen air. Anything frying gently in butter tends to scent the kitchen in a seductive manner, but ricotta hotcakes and eggy croissants are particularly effective. Add to that some spicy, fruity porridge simmering away, and all the perfumes of Arabia, to borrow a phrase, will pale into insipidity.
Turning porridge into something special is very simple. If you want to be truly decadent, soak some sultanas overnight in sweet sherry, so they plump up. Even without this preparation they will soften and swell if simply put in dry at the start of the porridge-making process. Adding some cinnamon, a little nutmeg, perhaps a smidgin of orange rind, will produce a very special porridge that merits topping with cream and a generous sprinkle of brown sugar. (And if you want to be utterly lazy, just get hold of one of Flahavan's ready-fruited porridges).
I leave sweet porridge for the rest of the family. For me, it must have a good salty tang and, on Christmas day, a slick of rich cream on top of the milk.
Eggy bread (or pain perdu as we used to call it in Drumcondra) is all very well for your average Sunday morning, but on Christmas Day it's worth making the ultimate version. This is the same in its essentials, but the bread is replaced by croissants, which are sliced in two lengthways, and cream is used instead of milk. Simply beat the egg with a generous splash of cream and a few drops of natural vanilla essence and pop the croissants in to soak, bearing in mind that they are less readily absorbent than bread. Just give them time, then fry gently in a lot of foaming butter, ideally unsalted. And don't overcook. You want a fair amount of moisture.
Eggy croissants should be lightly dusted with icing sugar and served with home-made apricot jam (or, failing that, the one from Bonne Maman). Unhealthy? Look, it's Christmas!
We first encountered ricotta hotcakes at one of Bill Granger's wonderful all-day restaurant in the suburbs of Sydney (which is called "bills") and we added the idea to our kitchen repertoire. They go well with the kind of bananas that have just reached their peak of ripeness, producing little brown spots on the skin.
This recipe is slightly adapted from the one that appears in bills sydney food (Murdoch Books, 2001). He serves it with honeycomb butter (as in the inside of a Cadbury's Crunchie) but we tend to stick with honey as made by bees. It's just as good with blueberries or raspberries.
RICOTTA PANCAKES
250g ricotta
180mls milk
4 eggs, separated
230g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
butter
Mix the ricotta, milk and egg yolks in a bowl. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a separate bowl and stir in the ricotta mixture to make a batter. Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Add half of the egg whites to the batter mixture and fold in. Repeat for the other half. Melt a little butter in a non-stick pan and spoon some batter in; it's best to cook three or four hotcakes at a time. Cook on a medium heat, turning once to ensure that both sides are nicely browned. Dot with butter, top with thin slices of very ripe banana and drizzle with honey, or serve with any other soft fruit you fancy.