Better than McDonald's muffin things, and truly British

Just a while ago, we got back from the weekly run to the Waitrose food store in Saltash, outside Plymouth. Today, we took our time and found amazing things, including Supasweet onions that you almost quarter but leave the bottom intact. Then you slather them with butter inside and out, and roast them in the oven to serve as a veg. Can't wait.

Still, I needed to get on the internet to check some things on another blog, and I got hungry, although dinner is a couple hours away. Then I checked the TV schedule for this evening--it's raining, we're bushed, and it looks like tube and ice cream after dinner. I noted the listing for an episode of the Hairy Bikers' food show.

When we first moved to Devon, I checked a cookbook by the Hairy Bikers out of the library. It was full of their mums' recipes for British favorites such as Yorkshire pudding and Cauliflower Cheese. I use the second of those, and even now I'm trying to figure out how to get a huge head of cauliflower into the tiny fridge (well, tiny next to US suburban standards.)

Anyway, here's a quick look at the two mountainous men and a really simple breakfast to make...and one which, it would appear, McDonald's more or less copied for all its McMuffin meals.



At McDonald's one orders the McMuffin things, just as in the states. But local breakfast sandwiches, predating the founding of McDonald's by a good bit, are called butties. The morning we landed, while waiting for the dog and cat to be cleared by DEFRA so we could all pile into the van and hustle to our beds after the red-eye flight, we had a breakfast buttie from the roach coach that pulled up outside the DEFRA building.

It was delicious, and not just because our last previous meal had been some kind of slop in a tiny plastic bowl and weak coffee served in mid-air 40 minutes before landing--which by then was a few hours back, what with immigration, luggage, car rental, getting lost, finding DEFRA....

We had bacon and egg butties. The ones in the video are bacon and sausage. Sounds even better. If I make them at home, I won't bake my own rolls; the bakery two doors away opens at 7. OK, they won't be as crusty as the Bikers'...but I'm not a morning person. I am, however, a sausagetarian...and I think the weekend shall not pass me by without a bacon and sausage buttie adding to what I need to walk off my hips on Dartmoor.

Maybe sprinkling the bacon before I cook it with some homemade sherry pepper sauce will burn off the calories!