This morning my wife an I decided to have poached eggs, seeing as she took care of dinner last night it was left to yours truly to prepare breakfast this morning (after cleaning the kitchen of course). So as usual I took out the egg poacher cracked the eggs into it perfectly and left it on the stove, placed the bread into the toaster ready to go down while I sat down to sip my coffee. It wasn't long before I smelt a burning plastic type of smell. I rushed into the kitchen to discover the inner plastic frame had melted into the pan. I'd forgotten to put water into the pan! Doh!

Well now that the poaching pan was completely ruined I had to find an alternative method to poaching my eggs...bummer! The thing is the reason we had a poaching pan was that none of us were very good poaching eggs the other way which involved a pot of water. The eggs usually turned out as a snotty mess! So I decided to do a search on Google for "how to poach an egg" clicked on the first link I found which was a comical article put together by someone in more or less the same predicament as me. They had gone to the trouble of googling "how to poach an egg" and had written a piece about each technique. Eventually favouring the place it in a Microwave proof cling film sack and then boil it. I was going to use that method but discovered we didn't have any microwave proof cling film doh!.

What I did

So I decided to brave it and use the Delia Smith method but instead of using a frying pan of simmering water I used a pot with little simmering water at the bottom (enough to cover the egg fully) and a teaspoon of vinegar. I cracked the egg and gently placed it into the simmering water where it sunk to the bottom of the bottom (no need to form a vortex). Letting it simmer (this means there are lots of little bubble at the bottom of the pot, but no bubbling which you usually see when you boil water. To my surprise the egg stuck together (it didn't spread all over the pot), it seems as long as you let it simmer gently the egg kind of stays in one place. So after all this time that's what I was doing wrong! The important and the nicest thing is that the egg only needs to be in there for a minute tops before its ready.