A little Christmas brunch

I was voluntold to make breakfast for my dad, stepmom, and grandmother on Christmas morning. I didn't complain too much because I do enjoy cooking, but it's so much nicer to have someone ask you to do something than to tell you that you're going to do something. It is what it is. I was feeling the Christmas spirit or something, I don't fucking know.

I decided to only use ingredients that were at Memaw's house, which was a great way to constrain what I could do. I started off by medium boiling four eggs, then dicing and frying some bacon while I scrambled up several more eggs. Once the bacon got crispy, I scooped it all out onto a plate lined with paper towels to try to get some of that rendered fat off of it, then I turned down the burner the frying pan was on.

I poured the scrambled eggs into the hot bacon fat and, while they fried, I whipped up some biscuit dough by mixing all purpose flour with 2% milk, plus a little table salt and sugar. By the way: from now on, when I travel to cook somewhere, I'm taking kosher salt with me. I can not deal with that table salt bullshit again.

When the eggs finished, I started up a béchamel. It's a very simple sauce, one of the Five Mother Sauces or whatever the fuck French people call sauces to make them sound regal. Anyway, back to the béchamel: I made a quick roux by melting a bit of butter in the bottom of the pan and whisking it while sprinkling in some more all-purpose flour until it got a nice, thick texture. I let the roux cook until it was starting to all brown, at which point I dumped in a lot of cream, a little salt, some black pepper, and a couple dashes of nutmeg. I whisked this all together until the roux was mixed in with the cream and kept it on a low heat to so very fucking slowly reduce.

With the sauce reducing, I rolled the biscuit dough as thinly as I could with a plastic drinking glass since I didn't have a rolling pin handy. By the way: from now on, when I travel to cook somewhere, I'm taking my utensils with me. I used the open end of the glass to cut circles out of the dough, then used my fingers to stretch them out a little thinner. With my thin discs of biscuit dough, I loaded some egg and bacon into the middle, then folded both sides up and pinched them together to make little dumplings or wontons or whatever the fuck you want to call them. 

I half boiled/half steamed the dumptons...no, that sounds gross...the wontlings, and that was that.

Meanwhile, I diced up the boiled eggs, dumped them into the sauce, and gave it a bit more mixing. Voila! Egg gravy.

Plating was simple enough. I was able to make four wontlings apiece, which I sat in some shallow bowls.

A scoop of gravy on top, and we were in business. Overall, it was okay. I gave it a C+, but I still feel like that was a bit generous. The idea was good, I think; the execution was pretty decent; the ingredients kind of failed me. It was all cooked well, just not seasoned nearly right. When I make this again (because you fucking know I will) with some kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, and maybe a few other ingredients to pep it up some. We can make this into an A. Easy peasy dumpton squeezy.