You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs

To achieve anything, you’re going to encounter problems along the way – you just have to try to keep them to a minimum. Like the Collins online dictionary reminds us:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs – you just have to break as few as possible.

Omelettes are one of our favourite lunchtime meals. For us, breaking “as few as possible” means cracking open four eggs – generously supplied by our free-ranging hens.

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You’d be hard pressed to find differences between our omelettes these days.

For years mine had something of the consistency of pancakes. I was good at getting the cheese thoroughly melted and any other ingredients heated through, and there’d be no singeing of the outside. But I had a ‘flat pancake’ problem – not much of an achievement.

June’s fluffed up but didn’t hold together well.

Eventually – I’m talking decades! – we compared notes.

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She showed me how she tilted the frying pan this way and that while the omelette was still mostly liquid. Using the spatula, she’d speedily move round the omelette, methodically sliding portions towards the centre of the pan while letting liquid flow back into the vacated space. Voila! A fluffy little number.

My turn in the sun was much more recent – measure it in months. June got curious. I like to think it’s because my omelettes were getting more praise than hers. Funny, but I don’t think I’ll ask her to corroborate that.

June would put everything on the side that had firmed up first, leaving the cheese to sprinkle on last. To melt the cheese and to avoid singeing the base, she’d fold the top over before it had completely set. It would tear, and sliding it onto the plate would complete the disaster.

To add insult to injury, the cheese, spread on top of all that cold stuff, hadn’t fully melted.

Whereas I made sure that one half was quite a bit runnier, and put the extras, cheese first and closest to the heat source, on that side. That half would take longer to cook because of the extra liquid and ingredients.

I’d fold over the empty half while the outside of the omelette was still a swirl of rich yellows and golden browns. And I could then leave it in the pan for a while longer without worrying that the base would get burnt. Everything would heat through beautifully.

Voila! Ultra thin-skinned, tender. My very own fluffy little number.

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