Who doesn’t enjoy a homecooked breakfast on occasion?  After a short stay in a hotel earlier in the year where, with great determination, a lot of patience and many, many glasses of water, I successfully ate the first breakfast I have had since I can’t remember, I decided that I must be able to re-create this – in a more suitable way for those of us living with oesophageal cancer.

I’ve since perfected breakfast with a sausage - grilled, two slices of crisp cooked grilled bacon, black pudding – grilled, poached egg and poached cherry tomatoes.

If you get it right it will look like the picture on the right and you’ll hopefully end up with a clean plate! 

My tips for making breakfast work are as follows:

• Getting the right sausages is really important. M&S Outdoor Bred Pork Sausages are the best I have found.  They are superb with such a soft texture, skin such as you wouldn’t know there was any and flavour as good as any
• Make sure to blanch the tomatoes so they are skinless
• Don’t over-cook the eggs as they provide a soft yoke which will aid the food to pass the obstruction,
• If you’re a fan of tomato or brown sauce, this, as with the egg is wet and will prove helpful.
• As always, have some fizzy water to hand.

As an aside, I have thought for a long while that bread was a non-starter.  Well, I’ve found a way round that too!  I used Hovis best of both seeded loaf, but I’d say any medium or thin sliced loaf would be fine and I made a full breakfast with a slice of bread fried in olive oil.  The bread was quite dry fried so it crisped up well and it worked. 

This is a monumental achievement which with I am very, very happy.  Who would have thought such joy could come from one slice of bread!