French Toast with Peaches and Home Fries

At this time of year Peaches are cheap and delicious. i tend to go through a pretty big peach binge, adding them to every recipe for a few weeks. one of my favourites is grilled peach pancakes. but today i went for something a little different and did french toast.


Nothing complicated here folks just a great simple recipe and fresh summery ingredients. 
I made my french toast with big thick slices of belgian loaf.
my egg dip is simply equal parts egg whites only and almond milk, cinnamon and vanilla extract.


made the homefries in my amazing Tefal ActiFry, which cranks out perfectly cooked home fries (among other things) every time in about 20 minutes, with half a tbsp of olive oil and without turning on the oven. can you say convenient!


the trick to cooking perfect french toast:
let it soak for a few minutes to get nice and saturated. cutting thick slices is a necessity so your bread doesn't just fall apart. you need plenty of cooking oil, and you need to get your pan to that perfect medium heat, not too hot (you don't want the egg to burn, and you want it to cook all the way through) and not too cool (you still want a good crust to form and let's face it, you don't want to be standing there forever). 
Let a solid crust form on one side (be patient and don't flip too early, this is a classic rookie mistake) and then carefully flip with a spatula, add more cooking oil or butter or PAM before putting the piece back down on the other side, otherwise the egg will stick on this side. keep flipping and adjusting the heat until perfectly cooked. brown on the outside and firm in the middle. don't over crowd your pan, it is better to do them in batches otherwise flipping gets tricky.


Peach syrup
I did five small peaches.
They were first boiled for a couple of minutes and then plunged into an ice bath to remove the skins. they were then fried with a touch of oil (just to grease the pan to prevent sticking-could be skipped with a good non-stick pan) a squeeze of lemon juice and a spoonful of sugar. 
of course what you could do is simply cook them a bit and then add your maple syrup and warm it up (nothing takes breakfast to the next level like warm maple syrup). i didn't do this for two reasons, the first is being poor and not being able to afford real maple syrup, the second is laziness.