Easter. Eggs. Easter eggs.

One of the saddest things which has ever happened to me was the discovery, some time ago, that eating chocolate makes me poorly. In the run-up to Easter I feel bereft what with all the creme, caramel, rolo and aero eggs taunting me from the end of every supermarket aisle. Ok, put the world's smallest violin away, I decided to cook some actual eggs as a nod to the time of year. Which is fine, I love eggs. I think a cooked egg with a liquid yolk is one of my top five things to eat: they turn pizza fiorentina from average to decadent; they're an excellent source of protein; and, higher welfare eggs are well within most people's price range. Although all of the following dishes have such long winded names--whatever happened to economic intriguing titles, such as 'eggs benedict'?

Part one of the eggsperiment appeared on our supper table on Monday. In an attempt to veer away from all the BBC recipes I use, I went to the lion eggs site and took this recipe for 'aubergine and tomato baked eggs'.

I like aubergines, I like eggs, it should have been delicious. But the whites took an age to cook, and were still liquid at the upper end of the cooking time. In the end, the foil had to come off and I had to turn the oven up. The yolks cooked solid, before the whites were edible, and the eggs were rather a low point on what was otherwise a delicious ratatouille-type dish. Perhaps that is why recipes which are not from a company trying to push a specific product are better?

Egg dish number two was a salad, not really an egg salad, but it had an egg in it. This was the cumbersomely entitled 'asparagus, egg and pancetta salad' from the most recent edition of Olive Magazine. I'm not so green as to not know that pancetta, asparagus and an egg combine very nicely, but they do, the mustard dressing is tangy and the croutons make it into a main meal; I did homemade ones, much healthier and nicer AND I still finished making it in 30 minutes. The egg in this dish is an eggstremely (sorry!) welcome component, rather than an odd rubbery topping. Yum, yum.

Lastly, but by no means leastly, I took on Yottem Ottolenghi's recipe for 'braised eggs with tomato spinach and yoghurt', from his healthy breakfasts series. This one was rather special as F and I cooked it together over a video link up, and what we had for our breakfast her and she and her other half had for dinner. The recipe must assume that the majority of readers are pan-shy plonkers, because although it claims there's a bit of work, it's no harder than working out the timings for a regular cooked breakfast. (I'm sure F would verify.)

Although this dish is the sort of thing that you could eat for breakfast or dinner, as we have shown, it did make a lovely warm weekend breakfast. I really don't need to add that eggs and spinach go really well together, and that this dish probably has a quarter of the calories of a full English, do I?

I can now report that the poll tells me you want me to cook 'sticky toffee cupcakes', there'll be a post on Thursday to tell you how they went.