“… in the hole” #1: Toad in the Hole
What? It’s sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding, aka pancake batter.
Why? You’re already having sausages for dinner – hooray! – and now you are pouring carbs over sausages. See how that works?
No, why is it called Toad in the Hole? I don’t know. The “toad” = sausage analogy is OK, sort of, but the “in the hole” part is blowing my mind. There are entire journals devoted to the question of whether a “hole” is defined by emptiness or the bit around the emptiness. Here the “emptiness” of the so-called “hole” is not only filled, but were it not filled, no hole would exist – because the “surrounding” bit starts as liquid – and so the hole comes after what is referred to as “in” it. Next you’ll be telling me it’s actually the sausage that’s the Hole and the Toad is the batter.
More modern, less paradoxical alternative:
- Han Solos in Carbonite
Or, obviously, now I look at my drawing:
- Turds in the Bowl
- Och, Nessie!
How? Make a standard pancake batter, which is 1 egg + 1 cup flour + 1.25 cups milk and a little salt (since it's with sausages, you could add pepper, herbs etc). Mix together (sift flour and salt, make a "well" and add the egg + milk and gradually draw the flour into the egg-milk) and then you’re supposed to “rest” the batter for half an hour. Preheat the oven and brown about 500 g sausages. While browning, put a couple of tablespoons of oil in a baking dish and put it in the oven so that the oil and dish get nice and hot. Arrange sausages in the dish, pour over the batter, put into the oven for half an hour. Salad and onion gravy would be nice with it.* This amount was supposed to serve 4.
* Allow me to remove the ambiguity: I mean "onion gravy and salad".
“… in the hole” #2: Wombat in the Hole
(with thanks to Aunty Carmyl)
What? It’s an egg fried “in” a piece of bread.
How? Take a piece of bread and make a hole by removing a piece about the size of a 50-cent piece from the middle. There are two schools of thought on what happens next. You can fry the piece of bread you have taken out of the middle along with the rest of the piece when you come to the next stage, or you can put it into your mouth. The first school is probably the better option, on reflection, but by the time you have reflected you realise that while you were reflecting you were also chewing. Next time! Melt some butter + oil or some margarine in a frying pan, add the piece of bread, and then either break the egg into the hole in the bread or break the egg into a cup and pour it in. Once the piece of bread is brown on the underside, turn it over to brown on the other side.
Why? There are a couple of advantages that an egg fried in a piece of bread has over a fried egg on a piece of bread. Firstly, fried bread. But secondly, the bread acts as a protective cushion around the yolk so that when you flip it over, the yolk doesn’t break, which can be problem when turning over fried eggs “out in the open”. Also, no rules of logic are harmed in the naming of this dish, for which one has to be grateful by this stage.
