I was supposed to bike over to Mickie’s Dairy Bar, the local greasy spoon diner, to meet my coworkers for breakfast before work. The weather though had other ideas. I woke up at 5:00 to rain. By 5:30 it was a deluge that included lightening which continued through 6:15 – well past my departure time to get to breakfast.
At that point I was up and wasn’t going back to bed. I would instead salvage my morning with a little diner like action of my own. I would get out the French press to make some coffee but more importantly, would scrounge up ingredients to make an omelet.
Growing up, my father didn’t do much in the kitchen, but he was king at fried potatoes and eggs. For the latter his specialties are egg sandwiches and especially omelets. He even put his omelet “recipe” in the church cookbook, listing your standard omelet fillings – i.e. ham, mushrooms, onions, peppers, etc. – but then completed the list with the phrase “anything loose in the back of the refrigerator.” I would like to think that my omelet making skills are partly from my dad – and also from Julia Child. No really, I must have watched the French Chef omelet episode dozens of times by now…
This morning I decided on making a sensible two egg omelet. I cracked the two eggs into a bowl and added a splash of milk. Not everyone does this but that’s the way I’ve always known (how dad did it) and I swear it adds some fluffiness to the eggs. I whipped up the eggs and poured them into a very lightly oiled frying pan on medium high heat. There’s two important things right there. You can’t have too much oil, because if you do the eggs will just kind of bubble and sit on top of the oil and be messy. The pan also needs to be hot. If I remember right, Julia uses high heat, but I find medium high gives a bit more control.
The next step after pouring in the eggs is to swirl them in the pan. You can sort of stir / scramble them first (as Julia does) but I find that just swirling works fine too. Swirling the pan evenly distributes the egg in the pan to make the omelet even thickness. As it gets maybe halfway through setting, you then need to start prying at the edges with your spatula. You do this to make sure the edges come away from the pan when you want to fold, but also when you want to plate the omelet.
Once the omelet is about three-fourths cooked you need to add the filling to one side of the eggs. This morning I just put down a layer of cheddar cheese and some baby spinach. After the filling, then comes the tricky part – folding the omelet in half. This morning I happened to get the omelet cooked perfectly on the underside and had a good edge so I could really get the spatula under the egg and flip it over the filling. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Luckily it all tastes the same and I’m usually making an omelet for just myself anyway.
I have no pictures to prove it, but today was indeed one of those times it worked out – not only for my omelet but also for my morning. I didn’t get to bike to the diner this morning as I initially wanted, but as I sat down to have my perfect looking omelet with a nice fresh steaming cup of French press coffee, I was kind of glad it was pouring rain.
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