Forget Eggs Benedict!

This is so much better!

Until Romania I never appreciated the perfection that is a soft cooked egg.

There they serve them with/on absolutely everything.

I had soft eggs on pizza, pasta, meat loaves, and most deliciously on mamaliga.

And when I was once served some eggs with sour cream and a tart cheese it changed my life!

And it inspired this little concoction.

Well, that and the famous Gordon Ramsey when he challenged chefs to a perfect egg cook-off.

I knew immediately what my entry would be!

(Had I, of course, been a contestant.)

Layers - to fancy it up a bit - of what are my all-time favorite breakfast foods.

A sandwich view from top down looks like this:

parsley

sour cream

egg

goat cheese

tomato

mamaliga

To. Die. For.

And some bottom up play-by-play:

1. I cooked the mamaliga the night before, let it set in a pan, and cut it out using a round cookie cutter. And because I didn't add any butter during cooking, I melted a bit over the top before 2nd layer.

2. Sadly, I was out of goat cheese, but that would come next, sandwiched between tomato & mamaliga.

3. A thick slice of roma tomato - I was lucky and mine was the perfect diameter.

I sprinkled the tomato slice with sea salt and was generous with the freshly ground pepper.

4. The egg was cooked to under easy in a round cookie cutter to maintain the shape of our breakfast tower, and gently placed atop the tomato. (see how all the yolk-y goodness seeps out? That's how you know it's cooked to under-easy perfection.)

5. I thinned the sour cream with a little milk, so it would more closely resemble smantana, and drizzled over the top, and then garnished with parsley.