The Egg Factory

If it's any indication how behind I am in my posts, my most recent visit to The Egg Factory was the same day I went to the Western Idaho Fair.  In fact, they were the reason I had so little appetite to sample all the deliciously horrifying fair food, so feel free to blame them for what a non-event that entry was.

What happened was that we had to be out of the house early because a crew was going to be installing new furnace and air conditioning equipment, so we had a couple of hours to kill before the fair opened.  The kids were hungry anyway, and my girlfriend suggested The Egg Factory.  We'd been there once before, but honestly I had been so tired that I couldn't really remember it, so it sounded like a good idea to me.

The Egg Factory is located in the strip mall adjoining Shopko at Fairview and Milwaukee in Boise.  I'll warn you here that the interior doesn't inspire confidence.  It's not dirty or disgusting, but it's very bland, almost cafeteria-like.  We piled in, ordered our juice and coffee and perused the menu for a remarkably short amount of time.  The kids both opted for the the pancakes with the rainbow-colored chocolate chips in them, and I'm sure they had some kind of cute name but I just can't recall it.  My gal the starch fiend went for the biscuits and gravy.  Now as I said, I'd been there before, but I barely remembered it.  That as much as any other factor resulted in my ordering the same thing that I had on my previous visit: the Sausage Lover's breakfast.  Sometimes you just can't improve on the menu description, so here it is...

A sausage lover’s array of two link sausages, a sausage patty, three scrambled eggs with crumbled sausage and our Factory Potatoes or Hash Browns smothered in our homemade country sausage gravy.

Horrified?  Read some of my previous entries, it should be obvious that I have a pork fetish. 

If you think I got a pic snapped of any of the girls' plates before they started tearing them apart, you have a lot of misguided faith in my abilities.  I'm hoping practice will someday indeed prove to make perfect.  In the meantime, here's a picture of my breakfast:



The Sausage Lover's breakfast


Don't you love the little fruit cup?  I don't know if it's a palate-cleanser or if it's an attempt to distract you from the fact that you are literally killing yourself with this meal, but it didn't matter because the children stole mine anyway.  For lack of any real method to apply to this plate full of madness, I simply started working my way through from the left.  The link sausage was good, but the patties were amazing, very old-fashioned and not perfectly formed like ones cut from a frozen log.  The gravy was rich and tasty (I of course tried a bite of my lady's biscuit to confirm it was the same), and the home fries stayed crispy beneath it.  I was very thankful for this, because otherwise it would have been like eating a meaty paper mache.  By the time I got to the eggs though, I was just about sick of sausage.  Sad too, because I could tell they would have been great.  As I pushed my unfinished plate away, I vowed to get something saner next time so I could really enjoy the eggs.  Everyone else seemed happy as well, though we were all itching to get to the fair.

But I wasn't done yet.  The Egg Factory provides your choice of "breakfast bread" along with your breakfast.  Our waitress was kind enough to point out that if you wanted, you can get a small order of pancakes as your breakfast bread, and I seized the opportunity.  The first option on The Egg Factory's pancake list is gingerbread, and as all who know me and harass me for my cookies during the holiday season will attest, I love gingerbread.  I'd wanted to try them since I'd first heard about them, and I was finally going to get my chance.


Gingerbread pancakes, possibly my new favorite breakfast food


I have to admit I was kind of nervous when I first looked at them.  I really don't know what I was expecting, but powdered sugar wasn't on the list.  And neither was the little cup of golden liquid sitting on the edge of the plate.  "Karo syrup?", I asked our helpful waitress.  She replied that no, it was actually a lemon syrup.  I guess my surprise was visible, because she assured me that it's a wonderful combination.  I saved the pancakes for the very end, partly because of my nervousness and partly because let's face it, they're one of the more dessert-style breakfast foods.  Perhaps I just needed something sweet to push back against all the salty food I'd just eaten, or maybe they were just amazing, but one bite reawakened my appetite.  I was considerate enough, however, to offer my girlfriend a bite and verify that she concurred with my opinion before I destroyed the rest of the stack.  No, I didn't finish them, but I made a respectable dent. 

In the end, I only wished that I had simply gotten the gingerbread pancakes and a couple of eggs, but then again hindsight is 20/20 and I will definitely be doing that when I return.  The atmosphere at The Egg Factory may be almost non-existent and a strip mall may be an odd place to expect truly great breakfast food in the first place, but they're succeeding admirably.  The one thing I want you to take away from this is that you need to try those gingerbread pancakes if you're even the slightest bit intrigued, either as a side or as the main event.  Feel free to get in touch afterward to thank me.


View Larger Map