Sunday Mornings with Mikey Robins
Ellie Parker 26 January 2009
"You get to a stage in life where you give up drinking to excess, so the only thing left to spend money on is eggs."— Mikey Robins
Mikey Robins is a raconteur extraordinaire. A bubbling tap of passionate stories, memories and amusing anecdotes, you get the impression that whilst he could happily talk about most topics, the subject of food brings a particular sparkle to his eye. He has a child's boundless enthusiasm for the good things in life, including a good breakfast.
His comedy has the common touch but his lifestyle is a way beyond the average.
"The best breakfast I've ever cooked in my life was when my wife and I hired a tiny apartment in the Campo Di Fiori in Rome. We timed the holiday because it was a ratings break but also because it was the middle of the porcini mushroom season. God I'm a wanker. Anyway, the Campo is the last market in Rome that sells fruit and vegetables. I remember waking up really early so that I could get to the market before the nuns got there - they tear the guts out of the good shit!"
I bought two porcinis and some Italian butter. It was 30 degrees back in the kitchen and I was sweating like a Jesuit at a junior soccer match. I got a hot pan, sliced the porcinis up and added just a touch of chili and a squeeze of lemon juice at the end. No toast, nothing. The wife came down and was delirious."
Mikey's recent move towards a healthy lifestyle (he had gastric banding surgery a few years ago) has restricted his eating habits for the most part. As an on air presenter on Sydney's Vega breakfast show, Mikey describes his week day brekkie regime as boring, consisting of "low fat, skim milk banana smoothie and low fat muesli with low fat yoghurt and low fat milk. And then I want to shoot myself".
Weekends normally allow Mikey a little grace, "for me, Sunday breakfast involves some scrambled "found" eggs with a little too much French butter, and just to make sure I haven't blown enough money, I shred some Jamon Iberico (posh ham) over the top.
We found this butcher who sells "found eggs"- they aren't just free range, organic eggs, they are "found". The idea is that the chooks run completely wild so they actually have to go out and findwhere the chooks have laid their eggs. Which is also why they're silly expensive."
Mikey doesn't breakfast out unless it's yum cha, "you see I've got this thing about eggs- between someone cooking the eggs in the kitchen and it arriving in front of me at a table, its very rare that a café gets it right".
A breakfast of yum cha chicken feet and ducks tongues on the other hand is fine. Mikey is one of those people who likes the yum cha trolleys with the trotters, eyeballs and offal. "The funniest thing I've seen in my whole life was in Aberdeen in Hong Kong. We went to a floating yum cha restaurant and there was a huge Dutch woman who got up out of her chair and chased down a yum cha trolley that had passed us by. She was so desperate. She got to the trolley just after me."