Poached Egg and Tomato Sauce on Garlic Bread

My mother found the recipe for this dish on a magazine when I was still in school.  So it must have been about 20 years ago.  I immediately fell in love with it, and I still make this dish once in a while.  J and my daughter love this dish, too.  The good thing about this dish is that you can use baguette that are getting to be stale.  Or if you have tomato sauce left over, you don't even need to cook the sauce.  I love recipes that I can use extra stuff laying in the kitchen!  

*Tomato Sauce*

2 cloves garlic

1 table spoon olive oil

1 small tomato can

Salt and pepper to taste

< 1 > Cook the garlic in the olive oil in a pan.

< 2 > When the garlic is cooked to golden color, pour the canned tomatoes and cook it for 20 minutes.

< 3 > Put salt and pepper.  Done!

*Garlic Bread*

4 slices of baguette

1 clove of garlic, cut to half

< 1 > If the bread is fresh, toast it to light brown.

< 2 > Put the cut side of garlic against the bread, and smear the garlic all over the bread surface.  The hardened bread should work like a sand paper against the fresh garlic.

*Poached Eggs*

4  eggs

Poach them as you want. My secret is to cook them in a coffee maker.

*Assembling* 

Place the garlic bread on the plates and pour tomato sauce on it, then put the poached eggs.

The tartness of the tomato sauce and creaminess of the poached eggs work very nicely together.  The bread gets very soft by soaking the moisture from the sauce and the eggs.

There is a egg called "Onsen Egg" in Japan. "Onsen" means hot spring.  The egg is cooked in natural hot spring which temperature is 150 F for about 30 minutes, so they are boiled very softly for long time.  It's very much like a poached egg, but because it's cooked very slowly at the moderate temperature, it's soft all over.  The yolk gets hard at 50 F lower than the temperature that white gets hardened at, so the yolk is not too runny even the white is still very soft.

It was very difficult to get Onsen eggs unless you are actually at a hot spring in the past, but it became very popular and the technology allows people to duplicate same effect without having natural hot springs.

This is the method that I read years ago on some Japanese web site.  I have been cooking poached eggs with this method since then.  The great things about this way of cooking are almost fool proof, you don't need to be glued to the pan, very easy to clean, and you can cook ahead of the time if you wish.

All you have to do is to put the fresh eggs in the coffee pot, pour water in it as if you are making coffee, and turn it on.  You want to leave them in the pot for about 8 to 10 minutes.  You need to do it for a few times to see how long the eggs should be left in the pot to achieve your favorite consistency.

Yes, it looks funny.  But it tastes really good!  

We recently switched to a french press from a electric coffee maker.  But we kept it to make Onsen eggs.  

For breakfast, we sometimes put it over the brown rice and sprinkle soy sauce over it.