Poaching Woes

No, this isn't a post about hunting endangered species.

FavoriteBoy and I made Eggs Benedict on Saturday for a nice, leisurely brunch. Eggs Benedict is a lovely meal - simple to prepare for two - or for a crowd.

HAH! Actually, Eggs Benedict is one of the few meals in the world for which I'd generally rather go out to a restaurant than prepare it myself. It's not just the egg-poaching, the canadian bacon-browning, the muffin-toasting, or even the hollandaise sauce-making. It's actually the dreadful, horrible, tear-your-hair-out saucepan-cleanup that really gets to me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but my poaching pot always becomes polluted and is a positive pain to, um, wash. (Okay, I'm done with the alliteration.) Saturday's pot has been sitting in my sink soaking for several days now, and tonight I finally got it clean - but the soaking, Bar Keeper's Friend, and elbow grease were all to no avail; I finally had to use a Brillo pad on my poor, beautiful stainless steel saucepan.

Seeking an answer to my clean-up dilemma, I did a few google searches. Of course, there are hundreds of sites telling you how to poach an egg (and almost as many different ways to do it), but none that I could find devoted to cleaning up the blasted pan.

In the course of my search, however, I did come across a very humorous site about poached eggs: B3TA: HOW TO POACH AN EGG. Complete with photographs, this site guides you through several attempts using a variety of different methods, including but not limited to "The Vortex Method." (If that's not enough to make you check out the link, what if I tell you that the author of the site is British and uses phrases like "bloody revolting"?) The top-rated method in the end involves wrapping the egg in plastic wrap before submerging it in the water, which I suppose would take care of the clean-up issue altogether - I'm just not sure how I feel about boiling plastic wrap in water and then eating the result.