CREAMED EGGS ON TOAST

RECIPES FOR DAYS WHEN YOU FEEL DOWN AND OUT, DOWN IN THE DUMPS AND DOWN IN THE MOUTH

When I was a little girl, my mother used to make this for me sometimes, if I was lucky, for breakfast. As a result, I have continued making it for my own family and it is definitely one of their favorites. It isn't fancy and it isn't chic, but it is good and on a scale of one to ten, it's about an eight in easiness. Often Mother would change it to a dinner dish by deleting the eggs and adding what was called 'chipped beef' back in the olden days. This was called, not surprisingly, "Creamed Chip Beef On Toast." Chipped beef is the same thing as the processed beef you get in the little packages in the deli aisle at the grocery store. Back then chipped beef came in little glass jars with a flat lid you had to pry off with a bottle opener. When the chipped beef was gone, you washed out the jar and used it for orange juice to go with your creamed eggs on toast at breakfast. It was the perfect size for a child's hand. Here is how she made it:

1. Boil 4 eggs for 5-8 minutes or until hard-boiled. Cool and then peel and chop into small pieces. Set aside.

2. In a medium-sized skillet melt:

3 T. butter, then add

3 T. all-purpose flour and

1 t. salt

Stir them together until the butter is melted and they are well blended and all the flour is completely absorbed.

3. Very slowly add 2 C. warm milk (you can warm it in the microwave. Just don't boil it.) Keep stirring all the time you are adding the milk. Continue stirring until the mixture starts to thicken. If it seems too thick, add a little more milk but only a little at a time. This is called a 'roux' and it's a good thing to know because you can use it for so many other things. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about making a roux:

Roux ( /ˈruː/) is a cooked mixture of wheat flour and fat, traditionally clarified butter. It is the thickening agent of three of the mother sauces of classical French cooking: sauce béchamel, sauce velouté and sauce espagnole. Butter, vegetable oils, or lard are commonly used fats. It is used as a thickener for gravy, other sauces, soups and stews. It is typically made from equal parts of flour and fat by weight.^[1] When used in Italian food, roux is traditionally equal parts of butter and flour. In Cajun cuisine, roux is almost always made with oil instead of butter and dark brown in color, which lends much richness of flavor albeit less thickening power. Hungarian cuisine uses lard (in its rendered form) or - more recently - vegetable oil instead of butter for the preparation of roux (which is called rántás in Hungarian).

So there you have it. As you can see, it is something you will be able to use for a lot of different things and you'll be glad you learned how to do it. It takes a little practice to get just the right consistency and to know when it's done. You don't want to cook it too long because it will start turning brown and that's not what you want. When it starts changing colors, turn off the heat and take it off the stove. Nothing tastes worse than a over-cooked roux or one that is well on its way to being burned.

Now that you have your roux, add the chopped eggs into it and fold them in carefully so they don't all come apart. Now make some toast and spoon the egg mixture over.

If you want to be fancy, you can add 1/2 C. small cubed pieces of cooked ham to the eggs or cook some sausage and add it to the eggs. No one would object and it will take it from ordinary to special. However, serving it just plain is okay, too, and that's the way I usually make it. Enjoy!