I’ve been making scrambled eggs for years, but it’s only been a short while that I’ve learned how to make them properly. You see, I would cook the eggs like an omlette and when it was done, I’d break it up into pieces – in my mind, effectively scrambling the eggs. It was only after reading Julia Child’s My Life in France, in which she describes how she learns to scramble eggs at the Cordon Bleu that I started to wonder. I tried it, stirring the beaten eggs in the pan as they cooked, so that the cooked egg would mix with the uncooked egg until they were creamy, fluffy, scrambled eggs.

I’ve eventually learned how to make scrambled eggs quickly – and it only takes two minutes of cooking time. Seriously, I timed it. Whoever’s said that scrambled eggs aren’t fast, that they take forever…this might make you reconsider when you’re in a fix for a quick meal.

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I like poached eggs. They’re easy and one of the fastest ways to cook an egg – faster even than frying, I think. Plus they’re flavourful and can be eaten with just about anything (or on their own, with a bit of salt and pepper) and, unlike some other forms of cooked eggs, still taste good even once they’ve gone cold. As Julia Child once said, “Poached eggs…are to my mind, the purest and loveliest of ways to cook eggs.” And loveliest of ways to eat eggs, too, might I add.

There are many ways to poach eggs – there is really no right way, as everyone has their own preferences and opinions about what constitutes a properly poached egg. Some find the prospect of cracking an egg into a pot of boiling water daunting if they haven’t before or they’re beset by past, negative experiences. I’ve used the plastic wrap trick before, but it was sometimes messy and nowadays I prefer putting the egg directly in the water. I don’t have poaching cups or rings. Using plastic wrap is really more about shape, it doesn’t make poaching eggs any easier or harder, in my experience. Once you’ve mastered the basic technique of poaching eggs, it’s beautiful to observe: for a moment, the eggs look ethereal floating in the water.

Make sure the eggs you use are fresh, reasonably so. Most sources I’ve come across say that eggs shouldn’t be more than four days old, though that could be tricky to judge when you’re buying eggs from a grocery store or supermarket, so the best guideline is not use eggs with a sell-by life of four to five weeks.  As eggs age, the albumen or whites become watery, for lack of a better word, which makes it separate from the yolk and falls apart when poached. With fresh eggs, the white will stay close to the yolk and not spread thinly. You can see this difference when you crack a fresh egg, observing that the white surrounding the yolk is thicker than the outer white.

So without further ado, this is how I poach eggs.

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil – I’m not strict about how much water, but guidelines generally state it should be a couple to a few inches. The size of the pot, and how much water, you use depends on how many poached eggs at a time you’re making.

2. Crack an egg into a bowl. For beginners or those who have not poached eggs before, this is easier than cracking the egg directly into the water, which requires a particular deftness. (Cracking the egg in a bowl also makes it easier for me to take pictures for this post than if I had to crack an egg into the water while holding the camera in my other hand. Imagine the catastrophe.)

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