The Siren Song of Ova

Eggs are one of the best items to have if you like fast, cheap cooking, and want excellent food. Eggs are the simplest excellent dish. You can make eggs just as well as some fancy Lyonnais chef can, here's the recipe:

Heat your iron pan. Put in 1-2 tablespoons of butter. Crack 2-3 eggs in a small bowl and mix, but not thoroughly. Wait until the butter just smokes and then dump the eggs in. It will sizzle, the clear albumen will turn white. Shake the pan back and forth over the heat as the eggs cook, this gives the eggs a little bit of fluff. Then slide out your omelette onto a plate, salt and pepper. Done. You could pay $300 for the same omelette.

There's all kinds of yakking in cookbooks about the perfect omelette and whatnot. There's nothing to it. The perfection of the omelette is that it's simple. Anyone can do it, easily. That's the perfection. It's not that someone who went to Le Cordon Bleu and then staged with some supercool celebrity chef like Susur Lee can make it any better. It's already perfect.

You crack the eggs into a small bowl, mix them up, dump them into the just smoking butter, shake the pan as it cooks. That's all.

There's also boiling the eggs. Put the eggs into room temperature water in a pot. Turn on the heat. Wait for it to boil. Keep the boiling very gentle, so the eggs don't break. Wait about 10 minutes (you'll have to do this by trial-and-error to find what consistency you like.) Dump out the water and fill the pot with cold water. Take out the eggs after a minute or so and peel the eggshells and the skin. Eat with salt and pepper. Perfection.

One silly thing I remember about boiled eggs --- I once went to Turkey for sightseeing. I wanted to see the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire --- being a classical history buff. So we were in Istanbul and we were served breakfast every morning at the small hotel we stayed at. And every morning it was hard to peel the skin off the eggs. We marveled that the Turks didn't know that you should chill the eggs right after boiling them to make it easier to take the skin off. The older lady who prepared the breakfast didn't speak English, and we didn't raise the point with anyone. So then we came back and we met a lady who raised chickens, and also my cello teacher raised chickens, and they'd give us their fresh eggs from time to time. When we boiled them and chilled them, the skins were hard to peel.... Turns out that the freshest, best, eggs, are hard to peel even if you chill them right after boiling. And so the Turkish breakfast lady wasn't the ignoramus, we were.

But anyway what's the siren song about? Eggs are attractive, a perfect dish, so simple, so easy, so fast, so flawless.... But there is a flaw! Eggs are pure protein, and they don't reach their highest until they are paired with a starch! How many times there were eggs in the fridge, and butter, and perfection awaited, but no, there was no bread! (Rubbing some garlic on toasted, sliced, French or Italian bread that has been drizzled in olive oil is the way to go. Bruschetta.) So now I keep potatoes on hand, but potatoes take a while to cook. And so the siren song of the eggs, ever beckoning, luring, leering.