Summer Omelet in the Dead of Winter
Sunday breakfasts are a celebration of a new week and a hoped for restful day ahead; the official end of last week’s dark tunnel of activity. I think it deserves some special treatment. This involves nice dishes, cutlery, good looking juice glasses, great coffee and a little ceremony. As there are only two of us at home now it is something I joyfully look forward to after I have given our diabetic cat his needle.
Just because the wide Soviet-styled snow plows are thundering up our street outside and there is new snow on the trees and yards and roofs, it doesn’t mean it isn’t an occasion for a recipe called Summer Omelet.
I found and kept this recipe from the old, first Harrowsmith Cookbook many years ago when I was a young mother and interested in whole foods for my family. The recipe now is in the form of a many-times photocopied page. On the original, I used letter blocks and a black ink pad to create the heading and then hand wrote the recipe on lined paper. I recall drawing a pecking chicken on one of the incarnations. It was copied for my adult children when they left home along with a lot of their other favourites and recipes which I thought they could manage in their new lives. The hubris of mothers….
There have been a few revisions to the omelet over the years. Not that it is complicated because it is not. What’s to an omelet you ask? Some eggs, some milk or cream, S & P, some herbs and some minced veg. The simplicity stops there.
I used to make this omelet on Sundays and then it fell into neglect amidst shelf-miles of other recipes. Recipes have their place and time and then the betrayal sets in as you move on to another great find and make that your steadfast companion for another space of time.
This recipe is oven cooked. It meant that I would not have to learn the finer points of making an omelet stove-top in a frying pan. This version was always successful. Puffed right up like an adder. And it is good for a large group for breakfast, a family for instance, as it uses six eggs.
I have many times tried to make a stovetop omelet and it is not for the faint of heart. Looking at instructional cookbooks for culinary students one finds that making eggs is at the top of the list to learn before moving onto other specialties. I gathered a few pointers from these instructional books, M. Stewart smartly called "making a perfect omelet" and one from an internet Google search. I tackled omelet-making as if I was going to be tested by a top chef. I tried for many Sundays in a row to achieve what was in my mind’s eye and have never been quite satisfied with the results. I do not like jiggly centres of anything and my efforts have so far resulted in an almost-cooked but not fully congealed centre of a stove-top omelet. It is a personal preference. I have yet to unlock the secret. The outside is perfect…the dead centre is well, not to my liking. Heating it any longer would result in a rubbery skin.
This January on a -24 degree morning, I was been pushing my recipe binders around adding new recipes and discarding other hopefuls all weekend when I came across Summer Omelet. Now I think of it as the kid’s recipes in this letter-blocked inked and mother-scrawled page. I am quite sure they have rarely if ever made it or if they did they have long since moved on as I have.
I remember that there are only two of us in the house now I determine to half the recipe. While a certain person sleeps on upstairs I start to assemble the ingredients.
I find a bag of fresh thyme in my veg bin. I am proud of this thyme. It is mid-January and I fished it out of the planter box during our mild December. It was still thriving and continues in good shape. Thyme has compact hearty little leaves that have a will to live…. I cut it down in case my luck ran out just after Christmas and have been using a small bush of it ever since. It seems to like the fridge environment.
Next I add some dried tarragon, dried parsley, some paprika, S & P and found some fresh spring green basil leaves in the depths of the bin as well, which I dutifully rolled up and cut into pieces as I was taught to do on the tv. Wasting not and wanting not, I use a left-over heel of tomato preserved for a moment like this. I minced a tablespoon or so of that and used a quarter of an already-cut onion lurking in the fridge. Then I minced it and tossed it in. Finding a bag with some shredded cheese from a pizza-building night, I rescued it and tossed it on the cutting board adding a little fresh parmesan to enliven the flavor. Three eggs, some milk, two small enamel dishes sprayed with oil to bake the omelet in and I am ready to assemble our breakfast.
Button mushrooms quartered are my most recent preferred method of delivering them to the iron giving frying pan with some butter, S & P and a sprinkle of thyme or tarragon. Bacon is set to sizzling on the only large burner. Coffee is started, table set, orange juice is poured, oven is pre-heated to 350 degrees, English muffins at the ready in the toaster and in go the two dishes full of golden promise. I turn on the oven light so I can watch the omelet’s rise.
Weather report – minus 24, sun all day and I can hear the house cracking just like the eggs.
