Vanilla French Toast

French toasts re actually called “Pain perdus” in French, which translates as lost bread in English, and is probably a more accurate term to give the dish as it was originally a way to salvage bread that was getting stale and hard and would otherwise go into the dustbin, the bread was soaked in a mix of egg and milk and then cooked on a greased skillet. There are many variant on that base recipe to give certain flavour to your bread, the one I grew up with were always sweet, as people in Switzerland much prefer a sweet breakfast to a savoury one. This one is a very easy one that takes minimal preparation, all you need to keep in your pantry is some vanilla essence, you probably have the eggs and milk in your fridge already.

Ingredients:

(enough to soak 6 slices of bread)

2 eggs
3 teaspoon sugar
100ml milk
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
6 slices of bread (I prefer whole grain bread)
icing sugar to dust the toasts (optional)

1) in a mixing bowl, break the two eggs, add the vanilla, sugar, and milk and stir to make a batter

2) Heat a frying pan with a little oil and dip one slice of bread in the egg mix until fully soaked and put it in the hot pan. Flip it from time to time until both sides are golden brown. And transfer to a plate, repeat with all the slices.

3) If using icing sugar, take a tea filter and put a teaspoon of icing sugar in it and sift it over the French toasts. Enjoy

- Presentation tip, cut the slices diagonally as above in the picture and arrange the triangle on a plate before dusting.

Flip Flop Jewel turned necklace

Waste not want not! I once had a pair of fancy red flip flops that had a big metallic ornaments with red stones on each thong, the flip flow went kaput beyond repair, but the silvery pieces were still more than fine, so I removed them, washed them and kept them aside. I thought they would make good pendants, and this is exactly how one ended:

I made this one a few years back using small red glass beads passed on two nylon threads which passed conveniently through the metallic loop in the back of the jewelled shoe piece, my plan was to get more strings of beads, but I never got around to do it and now I like it the way it is. I still have the other jewel in a box, and I’m yet to find an idea in which to use it, but its day will come. There are things that are just too pretty to trash without thinking about how to salvage some parts of it don’t you think?