A tasty new breakfast: Egg in a tomato

I have been wanting to learn how to cook for a long time now, and ever since I got a StumbleUpon account and clicked "food" as one of my interests, the feeling has done nothing but grow. I find new recipes online constantly, bookmark them, but never get around to trying them. This is usually because the recipe is either too time-consuming, would require me to buy a lot of expensive foods at the supermarket, or is just out of my range of abilities as a novice cook.

Yesterday, though, a simple two-ingredient recipe popped up as I "stumbled." It looked delicious and completely fool-proof. It was a recipe for an egg which was baked inside a hollowed-out tomato. I already had a carton of eggs in the refrigerator, and tomatoes are inexpensive, so I made a quick trip to the supermarket and picked up three tomatoes -- I reasoned that if this was to be successful, I could use the additional two tomatoes to make breakfast for my boyfriend and his twin brother.

I've never been a fan of eggs as a breakfast food. It was never that eggs didn't taste good, it was just that they didn't taste great. This recipe, though, looked like it had the potential to completely alter my view of eggs. I imagined some of the juice from the tomato slowly seeping into the egg as it baked, the sweetness mingling with hot egg whites and adding new texture in sprinkling a little cheese over it in the last few minutes of baking. Nevermind the fact that the meal would be a nutritious one -- the other part of my wanting to learn how to cook was wanting to do so in a way that is conducive to good health. Eggs may be high in cholesterol (one small egg can have 50% or more of your daily cholesterol in it), the meal would be perfectly acceptable because my diet does not consist of any other high-cholesterol foods. Since the egg would be baked and not fried, there would be no butter involved.

I had only to wait until morning for my breakfastime takeover.



Mine may not have come out as pretty-looking as the pictures attached with the recipe, but it tasted great -- better than I expected it to. I sprinkled some shredded cheddar cheese in the last five minutes of baking. It was so good, I didn't even offer to make it for my boyfriend and his brother because I wanted to use my other two tomatoes to make it again for breakfast tomorrow.

Problems I ran into

The ramekin I used to bake the egg and tomato was a little too big, and the tomato didn't fit snugly inside of it. While it was in the oven, the tomato sort of ripped (as you can see in the picture). When that happened, some of the egg spilled out into the ramekin. The tomato fell apart a little more when I went to take it out of the dish and put it on a plate. These weren't serious problems though, because the amount of egg that was lost was so minuscule, and none of the flavor was compromised.

Overall, this recipe was awesome. It's thisclose to becoming my day-off-from-work breakfast.