My Favourite Brunch

Brunch

I like my brunch to work an Eastern European vibe. Think eggs cooked up with the kind of spiced sausages that leach dangerous, stain-making fat onto pyjama tops.

Now you may be asking yourself, quite understandably, why the hell I’m suggesting mixing eggs and sossidge of a morning like it’s something new. Well the reason is this: cottage cheese. No, honestly. I am perfectly aware that in the hierarchy of ‘secret magic breakfast-enhancing ingredients’ cottage cheese is generally…nowhere, but I promise you, this a game changer. Firstly you need to get your hands on some decent cottage cheese – none of that watery guff they sell in the supermarket. I’ve been using the Longley Farm brand which is creamy and re-assuringly dense in the pot. It brings some freshness to the dish, as yoghurt would, but it’s more substantial. Fantastic with eggs. Yes, ‘fantastic’. Who knew?!

The dieters can keep their watery cottage cheese for topping salads. I shall get on with lobbing scoops of it into my brunch.

Brunch

Brunch Eggs with Spiced Sausage and Cottage Cheese

There are loads of ways you can take this actually, by using smoked Hungarian sausage for example, or omitting the meat altogether and serving with pickled beetroot for a Russian flavour. Russian brunch! Fancy that. If that becomes a trend then remember where you heard it first.

Sometimes I add garlic, too, but it depends on how you feel about that kind of thing at brunch.

1 small onion, diced
6 eggs
4 spicy sausages (Greek, Turkish, whatever you like). I used sucuk, sliced into chunks
Cottage cheese
Chives

Heat a heavy based skillet and lob the sausage chunks into it. Once the fat starts to leach out, add the onions and cook gently until the onions are soft and the sucuk is cooked.

There will be a lot of fat in the pan at this point, so drain most of it off but reserve it.

Lightly beat together the eggs in a bowl, season them, and add to the pan and just sort of break them up a bit and encourage everything around the pan on a low heat so it doesn’t stick – you want nice big soft clumps of egg, not bitty over-cooked scramble.

When it’s almost done (the eggs should still be a bit under), add some dollops of cottage cheese. Give it barely a minute, as the residual heat will finish off the eggs. Take a teaspoon or as much as you like of the reserved sausage fat and drizzle over the top. Sprinkle with chives and serve with bread if you like. I don’t usually bother as it’s so filling but it would probably serve 6 if you did.