Full English

I made us a full English breakfast yesterday morning, or nearly as fully English as our current circumstances permit, English with a slight & compound accent that would have been difficult for an uninformed arbiter to place. I began with the bacon, Swedish bacon alas, the only kind stocked in our nearest supermarket. Despite our relative proximity to Denmark, Danish bacon is not widely available here. We have made no sightings of British or Irish bacon, beyond what we have smuggled in ourselves. I put the rashers in a frying pan with a little vegetable oil and watched them shrivel away to about half their initial size as they fried, picking them out when done to a suitable crisp. Next I fried some sliced mushrooms in the same pan, adding a little more oil, meanwhile frying some readymade hash-browns in a thick layer of oil in a second pan on the back burner. These weren't hash-browns per se, which, in any case, would have been a concession, to my mind, to the North-American breakfast experience, but rather frozen potato rôsti. Also at around this time I heated the contents of a can of Heinz baked beans (organic ones, naturally - why stint on the wholesomeness now?) in the microwave, and toasted the first couple of slices of bread. We also had sausages in the freezer, and, I think, even haggis, but I resisted adding these into the mix. Putting aside the fried mushrooms and would-be hash-browns, I then fried four eggs, two sunnyside-up for myself, two overeasy for my wife, before putting the heated beans in the frying pan for a minute to take on some of that bacon-grease flavour. By this time the second round of toast was nicely scorched & ready for buttering. All that remained was to arrange the bacon, eggs, hash-browns, mushrooms, beans and toast on to a pair of plates and take them upstairs to bed... very tasty!