Scarborough Fair Scrambled Egg and Rice Cake Melt

When I was younger, a variation of Scrambled Eggs that my mother used to cook for the family involved adding to the mix. Bacon chunks worked well, tomato chunks somewhat less so - if only because I was finicky about tomatoes in those days - but the most popular, and most commonly used, addition was parsley flakes.

More recently, I was watching Jamie Oliver one night, preparing a conserve of his in which he marinates blocks of Feta cheese in olive oil with mixed herbs, including sage, rosemary and thyme; and it says something about the weird way my head works sometimes that on hearing this I immediately quipped to the TV set “All he needs is some parsley and he can go to Scarborough Fair!”

Recalling this later, I came to realise that as far as I knew, nobody had combined parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme other than the writer of that old English tune popularised by Simon and Garfunkel, so I decided to try it for myself. Here is the end result.

Ingredients

• Eggs
• Milk
• The Aluminium Chef’s Scarborough Fair herb mix - as the old tune says, “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”, in equal measure
• Cooking salt
• Butter
• Cheese slices
• Rice cakes

Method

1. Begin by whisking together the eggs in a mixing bowl - generally use the number of people to be served, plus one
2. Add a dollop of milk for more body
3. Add a liberal pinch of cooking salt [or at least I usually do, but I have heard recently that this causes the egg to toughen, meaning this step can be skipped if one prefers their egg mix soft]
4. Finally, add a portion of the herb mix
5. Pre-heat a frying pan and line it with butter, then pour the mix in
6. Fry the mix, turning often, until the mix has thickened or begun to brown
7. Serve atop rice cakes lined with cheese slices

This last part, about the cheese slices and rice cakes, came out of some experimenting one weekend morning when I was looking for an alternative to the usual slice of toast for serving the scrambled eggs. Depending on the type of cheese, it can add flavour to the egg mix alongside the butter that lines the pan.

Enjoy. ;)