I hardly eat breakfast, but when I do on the weekends, it’s pretty good. I’ve always loved pancakes and especially french toast. One of the more decadent breakfast dishes that I’d always heard about was eggs benedict. I had it on a cruise ship once and wasn’t that impressed, but I had it at some amazing breakfast place around 54th and 9th in New York, and I was absolutely blown away–it was delicious. It’s supposed to be a hard dish to make, so I decided to give it a try. It turns out it’s actually not that bad, and it came out to be a delicious dish.

If you don’t know what eggs benedicts is, it’s an english muffin with canadian bacon, topped with a poached egg and hollondaise sauce. The recipe I followed was from the pioneer woman, one of my favorite blogs. Here’s what it looks like:

I had trouble finding canadian bacon at first and kept looking in the sandwich meat section, which is where the bacon is in our grocery store, but canadian bacon, which has much less fat, was actually in the pork section with the meats.

I butterred the muffins and put it in the oven with the canadian bacon under the broiler.

Now poaching an eggs is supposed to be one of the hardest things, but I found it to actually be pretty easy. I just boiled some water in a pan, threw in some vinegar, swirled the pan around and dropped the egg in. The eggs I got were super-fresh from the farmer’s market, so when I poached them all the whites stayed together.

I accidentally broke the yolk on one egg before putting it in the pot, but it still turned out pretty good.

For the sauce, I followed the blender recipe from pioneer woman. It amazes me how rich the sauce is. It’s basically just egg yolks and butter. I also put a generous portion of cayenne pepper in there.

I tasted the sauce. I thought it was a little bland, but in the dish as a whole, it was quite good. I’m not sure if that means the sauce was messed up, or that’s how hollandaise sauce is supposed to taste. Also, I ended up putting some ground pepper on top, but next time, I’ll probably throw it into the sauce.

All the poached eggs turned out pretty well, except for the one where the yolk was broken. I was a little paranoid about undercooking it, and it was still a little runny when I cut into it. However, I think I’d like it a little more runny next time, though. The problem is that when cooking a poached egg, the yolk will still feel jiggly even if it’s cooked pretty thoroughly.

I think the canadian bacon was a little dry, so next time I’ll take it off a little earlier since the english muffins seem to take a little longer.

Here’s everything assembled. Definitely pretty easy, especially given it’s reputation, and it’s definitely one of my favorite breakfast dishes.