Squidgy and Soft as a Baby's Bottom




I found out one more time this past sunday that the one true way to a woman's heart is...well-cooked eggs.  That is if they are done in the form of a ham and cheese omelet.  On a Sunday morning.  At the cabin.  Helps if it's been sunny and nice outside.  Good sleep counts.  Now on my four hundred and twenty-ninth attempt, I think I mastered the Jan-Happy Omelet.  For me, it came down to using the wrong pan and accidental ingredients, but really the beauty of a good egg shouldn't be overlooked.  One of the great, world-renown chefs of the last fifty years, Micheal Roux,

who has been cooking French along the River Thames at the 3-Star Michelin Waterside Inn near

Windsor England since 1972, helps us in his book Eggs to think about the egg as a lovable ingredient. "Eggs have always fascinated me.  I love their oval, sometimes elongated shape, the purity of their lines, and the tint of their shells...When I hold an egg in my hand, I feel that it represents the image

of the universe, and it awakens and increases my respect for life."  I might not have had the universe in mind Sunday, but it was about time to capture, for once, a thin, soft, pale, (not brown) moist, seasoned but not spicy, well-stuffed and folded omelet.

The pan I used was our old stand-by extra large, but because it was warped upwards in the middle, in the beginning all the egg drained down along the outside edges, creating an egg ring.  I was doomed.  A hole in the middle of your 'universe' omelet does not win you brownie points on the ground, so to speak.  I continued to spatula the eggs inward at low heat so that the surface would not brown – a brown, holed omelet is even worse – and it eventually worked.  Ten minutes later, after adding cubed cooked ham and a cracked pepper white snacking cheese left from the day before, a heroic egg 'flip,' I had what Roux calls the definition of a perfect omelet, 'just a touch of color; delicate to touch, squidgy, and soft as a baby's bottom.'  The three-egger was devoured quickly and without ketchup, the omelet cook's greatest compliment.