Breakfast in Makiki

I’m a homemaker and retired nurse, living with my husband in Honolulu. I love to eat, to cook, and, unless I’m tired and/or hungry, to shop for food. One of my favorite sayings is by Hippocrates: “Let food be your medicine.” To that I would add, and your fun.

My husband and I live in a 34^th floor apartment that overlooks Makiki Heights. It’s a green view of monkeypod and African tulip trees, palms, banyans, plumerias and bougainvilleas, all rising up toward Round Top Drive and the Koolau Mountains. Directly below our apartment, on Nehoa Street, there’s a Korean Baptist church and a Montessori school. Kitty-corner across Nehoa is Roosevelt High School. Early mornings, the school band practices on the athletic field. Friday nights, during the fall, there are football games.

I love the early mornings, when noisy green parrots fly past our apartment lanais and white fairy terns glide over the heights. The view from the lanais is like having a large and beautiful, albeit distant, garden (that we don’t have to tend).

Most mornings, we eat breakfast on the dining-room lanai off our living room. Weekdays we have peanut-butter toast and fruit salad, Big Island coffee and Earl Gray tea. Sundays we have a special, but not a fancy, meal. I make bull’s eyes--eggs set into the cut-out center of a piece of bread and fried in olive oil. My husband taught me how to make them (and his father taught him). He prepares the fruit salad, and I make the breakfast salad. The breakfast salad is a recent addition. I’d heard about “breakfast radishes” and was intrigued. What are they? French radishes? Mild and pink, not peppery and red? I still don’t know. But one Sunday morning, an uneaten green salad was leftover from Saturday night’s dinner, and we ate it with our bull’s eyes. I can’t remember if the salad had radishes or not, but with or without them, it’s become part of our special Sunday-morning meal.

The whole breakfast takes only 15 minutes to put together. It’s a great way to start a Sunday or any day.

For two bull’s eyes, you need 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 2 fresh eggs, and 2 slices of sourdough or other sturdy sandwich bread. Cut roughly 1 ½ inch circles out of the middle of the bread slices and set aside. Heat the olive oil in a wide skillet until fairly hot. Then put the bread slices, with their centers alongside them, in the skillet. Crack one egg into each open circle. Fry the bread slices with their eggs and the small circles of bread on one side until brown, then turn with spatula and fry on the other side until the eggs reach the desired doneness. We like ours with the whites cooked and the yolks runny, which takes about 2 to 3 minutes each side. For keeping the yolks intact and overall appearance, a nonstick skillet works best. But we use a stainless steel paella pan for ours. It’s wide enough to hold two bull’s eyes, and we don’t mind a broken yolk now and then (to be honest, almost every time). The olive-oil fried eggs and crisp bread taste wonderful together, and the little bread circle is great for sopping up dressing from the breakfast salad. Add a little fruit and yogurt, and we are in Sunday morning 34^th-floor heaven, overlooking that garden rise and watching the birds fly by.

Here are the makings for the breakfast salad:

 

The bull’s eyes in progress:

And the complete meal:

 

Oops--I almost forgot the fruit salad: