The continentals do supply a decent sized breakfast, which we are making full use of. We substantially underestimated the amount it would cost to keep ourselves fed for more than a fortnight, so we are tending to wade in heavily to whatever is on offer of a morning. Nature seems to have “blessed” me with a system that copes well with what Formula 1 types would call a “One Stop Strategy,” wherein I eat enough at breakfast to see me through the day. Sarah is coping less well, due I suspect only to a shortage of storage space.
The typical continental breakfast contains:
A hard boiled egg (and I do mean hard)
A round of bread and cheese
A croissant
Some yoghurt, possibly taken with a fruit salad
Several types of sticky fruit cake / sweet bread
More bread, this time with sprinkles and / or Nutella (or similar)
Fried bacon and (usually rubbery) scrambled eggs
Diverse buns
Cereal
Orange juice
Coffee
Herbal tea
As your breakfast correspondent I have found it necessary to sample as many of the above as possible whenever they are offered.
No one hotel has achieved perfection at breakfast time, but with a vista of curled-up cheese slices and fizzy fruit salad the “Abdij de Westerburcht” certainly underachieved. That said, it made a welcome change to be entertained there by a loop of Cheesy Listening / Lounge Singer / Big Band renditions of such classics as “Without You“ and 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” while we attempted to eat our own body weight in cheese on those two mornings. Before you point out the obvious contradiction I should let you know that the previous three breakfasts had been taken against a background of “Now that’s what I call Music ’86,” and that was in two separate hotels.
I once worked with a Dutch electrician who referred to the channel ferries as time machines, as he felt that every time he came to England on one it was like going back in time. Having heard what the Dutch choose to listen to I’ve got news for him… To put it another way, I thought that the day would never dawn when “The Wind of Change” by The Scorpions would be the highlight of my musical day, but that day dawned at about 6am Dutch time on Tuesday 31st May, 2011.
Saturday, June 4th, 2011. Today’s breakfast taken to “American style soft-rack ballads of the 80s & 90s” which I had assumed to be another “Now that’s…” style collection, but which in actual fact is a radio station. Is there no part of the day at which the Dutch consider it inappropriate, or at the very least, bad form to subject the plucky but unprepared English traveller to “The Wind of Change” without at least an hours warning? It seems not.
*Stop Press*
At this morning’s breakfast in Schagen there were no fewer than four different egg choices on offer; Hard Boiled; Soft Boiled; Rubbery Scrambled and Raw. Yes, that’s right, raw. I tried two, and raw wasn’t one of them. In my world, there is only one circumstance where it is acceptable to offer someone a raw egg to eat unless you are a quack doctor, and that is when you are serving it atop a steaming pile of my favourite Scandinavian dish, Pytt i Panna. (Don’t try this at home; I am an experienced professional, trained to deal with such things.) Pytt i panna is a high calorie food intended for use in the Swedish winter… This is the best online recipe that I could find for it, but it's wrong in one key detail, the egg should be cracked open but left in it’s shell and placed on top of the food, cooking gently (in theory) on the way to the table. Sarah estimates about 4000 calories per serving if done properly.
Pytt i panna recipe
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