breakfast and tea

i'm starting to get better with eggs. yesterday it was french toast. today it's poached eggs. maybe i'll do shirred eggs, deviled eggs and eggs benedict soon!
it was difficult to lower the egg into the water and get it to form into a round bob; out of seven i cooked, only one rolled into the water and formed a ball. the rest just spread open their whites, like how precipitates form during double decomposition.
sprinkled with salt and black pepper, to go with toast. nice breakfast! compared to soft-boiled eggs, the poached egg has a much firmer white, but the yolk is just as liquid. i just love the way the egg yolk flows out.

then i made the lemon meringue pie again, to use up the egg whites i had in my freezer.
this time i went back to my old pie dough formula. instead of using flour twice the weight of butter, i followed my american book: 1 cup butter to 2 2/3 cups flour. this, i'm quite sure, deviates a lot from the 1:2 ratio formula. and then i realised why nigella always had less problems with pie dough: the ratio formula uses a lot more flour, and this makes a dough that is easier to handle, though the crust eventually becomes tougher.
cooking the lemon curd. when i baked the pie today, the curd didn't set up properly, which i only discovered after cutting out one slice. so i sent it back into the oven and baked it again.
don't laugh at the shit-like tubes! today i piped the meringue onto the curd filling, and then used a spatula to smoothen it out and make a beautiful dome. at least it looks better than the one i made previously.
lemon meringue pie again. when i cut through the pie and removed the slices, i could see a very interesting pattern of tunnels in the meringue layer - a result of the piping of the meringue onto the top.