Yummy Malaysiana: soft eggs with buttery herb-gruyere toasts

I wish I could tell you that I had good reasons for sharing this recipe today, earnest ones. If I were a different sort of writer, I might dig deep into my past and crank out a few graphs about my late German grandfather, who ate a soft-boiled egg for breakfast every morning for as long as my mother remembers. (Also, brisket for dinner.) Maybe Id tell you about the period of 2004 when I did the same, pining for the perfect crouton, perhaps buttered toast fingers raised to a previously unfathomable level of deliciousness, but didnt get to it until this week.

And while each story would be in some ways true, none are the actual truth, which is that were talking about soft-boiled eggs today because omg I found the cutest set of egg cups, egg cups with chickens! and I had to buy them. Yeah, shopping. I told you the story would be better left to more artful scribe. To buy them, however, Id have to use them, and to use them, it was time to consider the crouton, and not just any crouton but the very most intensely delicious crouton I could dream up. Theres an ample amount of melted butter and a slip of Dijon mustard, theres Gruyre and a tiny bit of Romano cheese, whose kicky/nutty saltines has me fixated lately. There are herbs, too, and this whole m! ixture i s literally caked onto fingers of sourdough bread, then roasted in the oven until bronzed, fragrant and tormenting.