Breakfast, poached eggs, potato

This breakfast makes use of leftover potatoes baked Friday night for a dinner party. The potatoes were hidden, wrapped in a kitchen towel, on the dining room table, sitting there all Saturday. Today is Easter Sunday late afternoon. They are very small, here are two of them chopped up.

These were the most cooperative poached eggs to date. A shallow pot of water was brought to the boil while the chill was taken off refrigerated eggs by resting briefly in a sink of hot tap water. As you well know by now, water boils at 10° cooler at Denver than it does as sea-level, even more cooler in the foothills, and cooler yet at altitude. So boiling water here is 202° even though it is boiling like mad and visibly evaporating like crazy. The pot is removed from the heat. Cider vinegar (only because there is a 1/2 gallon of it. The vinegar could be any kind at all) is carelessly dumped in quantity. I'd guess 1/4 cup or possibly even more. Not to worry, this will not make the eggs taste like vinegar. Almost all of it stays with the water. Very little of it stays with the egg, so don't hold back just because of that. The water is also salted. The egg is cracked into a ramekin the spilled into the hot water. One at a time, the whites of each of these eggs held together tightly, and none of the egg white stuck to the bottom of the pot. I'm usually not that lucky. 

Are they bee-you-tea-full or what?

Mexican queso blanco, which is surprisingly good. The kind that melts.

A simple gravy is whipped up in the same pan the potatoes were cooked.  Two or so teaspoons butter plus 1 teaspoon flour. Less flour than usual because cheese also thickens sauces. On the heat, commercial chicken broth is whisked in. The mixture boils furiously. Experts always tell you not to do this. Warm liquid into warm roux or they will insist cold liquid into warm roux off the heat. It's all nonsense. Just dump in the liquid and whisk immediately and all is forgiven. The only way you can go wrong is to not whisk immediately as you dump the liquid. Then adjust the liquid as necessary right there on the spot. At that point of adjustment you can even change liquids which has the benefit of adding depth and character to your sauce. I didn't do that today because every now and then I back off and become simple. 

The spices in the roux are the careless combination that was concocted last night for the hard-boiled Easter egg packages. There is an excess so I am using it now. What the heck, I love the stuff.  

Cheese is already a processed food. Cooking it tends to break it down, causes it to separate. We do not like that. Therefore, cheese is added off the heat. In this case, the pan was swirled to mix the cheese into the thickened broth. It never fully incorporated and had the appearance of cheese that separated, but that is a false impression. It never had a chance to fully melt much less to separate.