Omelettegate

"Egg may be dressed in a multiplicity of ways but seldom more relished in any form than in a well made, expeditiously served omelette." (Eliza Acton¹)

I love eggs.  First choice: boiled.  Or no, scrambled.  Or no, perhaps poached and perched atop an English muffin and a slice of ham and dripping with home-made Hollandaise.  I love egg yolk smeared across a Fiorentina pizza, thoroughly eggy eggy bread, eggs oozing over a salad niçoise.  I'd fly back to London in an instant on the promise of a freshly-made scotch egg.  Well you get the point: I love eggs.  I love them every way they come, but one.  I cannot stand an omelette.  Why, I cannot say, but I absolutely loathe them.  Excepting, for reasons that remain unknown to me, the omelette as made in India, where they are often huge and light and fluffy and mostly made of plasticky cheese, I just cannot stomach them.  The very smell makes me want to vomit.

Yet for some reason, and I still don't know why, I last week made omelettes for lunch.  I'm not sure what I was thinking: perhaps if I make one it will be different?  Perhaps something's changed, perhaps I was wrong and now will see the light?  I generally consider dislike of an everyday sort of food to be utterly irritating and overly fussy and with the exception of marmite and all things aniseedy, I've been able to accustomise myself to all sorts of everyday tastes that I previously hadn't the inclination to try (note 'everyday': this does not, then, include fermented mare's milk, snake wine or tripe and oxtail curry.  But I make no apology for this).  

I digress: I had been rediscovering Delia's marvellous How To Cook 1, in which she divulges an inordinate amount of information about eggs.  She tells one how to gage how old an egg is, how to store them, how to separate them, how to whisk an egg white; how to make meringues, custard and soufflés; frittata, tortilla and open-faced egg sandwiches; how to make egg curry, egg salad, eggs en cocotte and, rather famously, how to make a boiled egg.  Delia devotes three entire chapters to eggs, and one of these is given entirely to the art of the omelette.  Delia can't be wrong, and I thus I decided I must be, and thus I decided to make one.

I followed all Delia's advice: I used a lovely seasoned frying pan.  I used fabulously fresh eggs.  I made sure the pan was as hot as I dared and I worked diligently with my tablespoon.  I filled my omelette with cheese and the thingy that's as close to bacon as the Germans want to get.  I sprinkled my omelette lovingly with finely sliced spring onion and though I couldn't quite master the art of folding, I presented it gently on a nice warm plate.  And do you know, my omelette turned out beautifully.  It was golden on the outside and fluffy and soft on the inside, just as Delia dictated it should be.  My husband absolutely loved his.  Mine made me want to vomit.  Omelettes and I are, I suppose, just not meant to be.

Delia's Folded Omelette (verbatim, for Delia Knows Best)

Before you begin, have everything ready: bowl, eggs, omelette pan, fork, tablespoon, salt and pepper, butter and oil.  Put the plates in a warm oven.

1. Eggs

One omelette will serve one person and, because it is so quick to make, it's not worth cooking a large one for two.  So, according to how hungry you are, use two or three large eggs per person.  Just break the eggs carefully into a bowl, add a seasoning of salt and freshly milled black pepper, then gently combine the yolks and whites with a fork - don't overbeat them, combine is the word you need to think of here.  Under- rather than overbeating the eggs seems to make a fluffier omelette.

2. Oil or butter?

You can use either, but remember that butter burns very easily on a high heat.  Some oil will prevent this from happening so, if you like a buttery flavour, I would recommend that you use half a teaspoon of each.  For extra butteriness or creaminess you could add a teaspoon of melted butter or double cream to the eggs in the bowl.

3. Heat

Heat is a vital element in omelette-making because the essence of success is speed.  Begin by turning the heat to medium, place the pan over the heat and let it get quite hot (about half a minute).  Now add the butter and oil and, as soon as it melts, swiftly swirl it round, tilting the pan so that the base and the sides get coated.  Turn the heat up to its highest setting now - when I first demonstrated this on television I remember saying, 'hot as you dare', and that still stands.  

4. Cooking the omelette

When the butter is foaming, pour the eggs into the pan, tilting it to to and fro to spread the eggs evenly over the base.  Then leave it on the heat without moving it for a count of five.

5. Working with a spoon

After 5 seconds a bubbly frill will appear round the edge.  Now you can tilt the pan to 45˚ and, using a tablespoon, draw the edge of the omelette into the centre.  The liquid egg will flow into and fill the space.  Now tip the pan the other way and do the same thing.  Keep tilting it backwards and forwards, pulling the edges in with the spoon and allowing the liquid egg to travel into the space left - all this will take only half a minute. Soon there will be just a small amount of liquid left, just on the surface, so now is the time to start folding.  Tilt the pan again and flip one side of the omelette into the centre, then fold again.  Take the pan to the warm plate, and the last fold will be when you tip the omelette out onto the plate.

¹in Delia Smith's How To Cook, Book 1 (1998)

Frau Dietz's Gulas

Until I ate gulas in Hungary, I never really quite knew what it was.  I remember ‘goulash’ being on the menu at school but my recollections are of chewy brown lumps of fatty meat in a puddle of brown liquid that occasionally offered a small chunk of something orange or red.  It certainly didn’t have much flavour, and I think it was served with rice.  When I ate my first, real, proper Hungarian gulas cooked by a real old Hungarian lady in real Hungarian wooden hut on a campsite in, yes, Hungary, I discovered what a proper, warming, flavoursome delight gulas should really be: slow-cooked, tender lumps of beef in a heated, hearty, brothy soup served with home-baked bread and lashings of red wine.

I continued, however, under the misconception that there must be some secret ingredient, some unobtainable herb or spice that meant I would never be able to recreate such a divine yet utterly humble dish.  Until yesterday.  B has been banging on for days about how much he loves gulas, and yesterday I thought to myself well then, let's just make one.  I think it’s actually the first time I’d ever thought that, so imagine my surprise when I after 30 seconds on the internet I discovered that it’s in fact a very simple and friendly recipe with minimum braincells required to make it happen.  I found out what the basic ingredients and the optional extras were, coming up with my own sort of version from what I learned on the internet and a couple of cookbooks: adding potatoes and red peppers it became more of a stew – and a Czech one at that, apparently – and though some recipes call for both caraway and marjoram, I would probably use both so little in future that I plumped for buying just one - the one that seemed to be the consistent one across all the recipes I came across: caraway seeds.

Ingredients (serves 2 with seconds and enough leftover for lunch):

1 packet of what the Germans actually call goulash beef, ie about 400g cubed chuck steak

1 large onion, or 2 small, cut in half and then thinly sliced into half-rings

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 red pepper, sliced lengthways into 1cm-thick pieces

3 or 4 medium-sized potatoes, cut into large chunks

1 tbsp paprika – Hungarian if you have it, but mine appears to be Indian

½ tsp cayenne pepper

½ tsp caraway seeds

1 tin tomatoes

1 pint hot stock (I only had chicken, but I’m guessing beef would make the flavour even richer)

Salt and pepper

Method

Soften the onions in oil over a low heat for a good five minutes, till translucent, then add the garlic, stir, and leave for a couple of minutes.  Next, turning the heat up a notch or two, add the beef and the caraway seeds together: when the beef its completely sealed, add the paprika and the cayenne pepper.  Give it all a good stir and then pour in the tomatoes and add the stock.  Bring to the boil, then cover and simmer gently for an hour and a half.  It will smell GOOD.  Now gently plop in the potatoes followed by the red peppers ten to fifteen minutes later.  Subject to seasoning with salt and pepper, your gulas is basically done when the potatoes are ready, so stick a knife in one after half an hour or so and see how they’re doing doing.  Altogether, mine stayed on the hob for a good 2 hours and 20 minutes, with the lid off for the last 20.

B reckoned that there could have been a few less caraway seeds in and I think I added one too many potatoes… but boy, was it tasty... and comforting... and warming... and hmm... I think I need to make that again.

Emergency Post: Banana Bread

I cannot tell you how over-excited I am about this banana bread. It's the recipe my mum used when I was small and BOY did I love her banana bread. And her banana ice cream, come to think of it. Must get that recipe off her. And also a freezer. Anyhoo, I have been thinking about banana bread a great deal of late, perhaps because I came back from London armed with some new baking tools (new as in novel, they were handed down to me by my lovely Grannie) including an unused loaf tin; it may also be because we have a large bunch of brown speckly bananas heavily perfuming the flat.

It turns out my loaf tin is a bit large, so my loaf was
a bit shallow.  Ah well, just get to make twice as
much next time!

Whatever: all of a sudden, yesterday became Banana Bread Monday. Honestly, I was having a mug of tea at three o'clock, thought "I'd really like some banana bread with my second cup" and was eating a lovely warm, crumbly slice of the stuff just after four (and with my wheat intolerance, was looking like an elephant in her third term of pregnancy by half five. Totally worth it, I might add). I was slightly unsure about the whole thing because (a) I have absolutely no faith in my baking skills WHATSOVER (and I have outlined my concerns about baking previously) and (b) when I finally got some internet access last night I discovered that my friend K had also been busily baking banana bread on the other side of town and she's basically a total baking pro, so I felt rather like there probably wasn't any point in doing it at all. (K oversaw me hammering together a Nigel Slater chocolate cake for my father-in-law's birthday a few weeks ago: it actually turned out extremely well in the end but with my haphazard preparation skills I'd be surprised if she has any faith in my baking either. She's a dab hand with an eight-inch knife and 500g hazelnuts, incidentally.) I also nearly had brain fail when I realised that my mum had sent me through the recipe in ounces so I was going to have to do some pretty hardcore mathematics (numbers are not a strong point; thank you, internet, for your plethora of conversion websites). To make things even worse, the recipe involved self-raising flour, a foodstuff which just does not exist here in Germany: I had to do further maths to work out how many teaspoons of baking powder I needed to add to my normal flour to have the same sort of effect. Completely exhausting, and of course I have no idea how any of these things work so aside from the cake turning out alright it's beyond a miracle the kitchen didn't just blow up. When it came down to it, I simply decided that rather than worry about things too much, I'd just shove everything together willy-nilly and rely on some good old-fashioned blind faith. And do you know what? It only bloody worked.

Ingredients

[I'm afraid I didn't make a note of the weight conversions I came up with, although to be honest, apart from the rather unreliable mathematical calculations I did, my extremely silly scales only have VERY LARGE AMOUNTS on them so any notes I took wouldn't be accurate in any case. The good news is it appears my presumption that all amounts needs to be exact for a cake to turn out as it should wasn't correct: oh, how I shall surely be embracing that discovery.]

Anyway, yes, ingredients...

1 large ripe banana, very well mashed

1 egg, beaten

2oz castor sugar

3oz butter

4 oz self-raising flour (or for those residing in Germany: normal flour type 405 plus a teaspoon and a bit of baking powder)

Method

Cream the butter and sugar together (I used my hands: it was fun), add the very well mashed banana and stir, then slowly mix in the egg. Next, gently fold in the flour. Mine looked very much like a really horrible undercooked scrambled egg at this point. If it's really very curdled (because your egg was massive), then apparently you can just add a little more flour to sort that out. Smooth the mixture into a small lined, buttered loaf tin and bake for 25 minutes at 350˚F (which I can tell you is 180˚). Funnily enough, even though my oven is fan-assisted it actually took more like 35 minutes, but you can tell when your banana bread is ready when you can push a knife into the middle and it comes out clean.

I literally cannot believe how easy it was, and it was just as good as my mum used to make it (if I may be so bold). Seriously, if I can do it, anyone can. Do it. Now.

Aubergine. Stewed!

I've just been back in London staying with my folks for a couple of weeks.  My dear mum had rather a lot on her (proverbial) plate with my dad, two of their three children, my brother-in-law, a visiting aunt and two small grandchildren all roaming around the place and so on arrival I told her I'd be doing most of the cooking whilst I was home.  Lots of brownie points for me of course, but hardly altruistic: one could say that with so much free time, my mother's wonderful Lacanche, a garden bursting with herbs and a brand new Waitrose down the road I was pretty much in heaven.

Whilst I was there, Mr Alan Rosenthal of Stewed! put a rather urgent-sounding call out for a volunteer to try out a recipe from his new book (out in October, published by Ebury, available to pre-order on Amazon and full of divine stews and one-pot dishes to fill even the most vacuous of bellies). Well, who was I not to leap at the chance?   The recipe Alan sent over was for Caponata, a sweet and sour vegetarian stew from Sicily that combines plump chunks of aubergine with a juicy mix of olives, capers, pine nuts and olives. I'm presently unable to get enough of the wonderfully fleshy beast that is the aubergine (see my previous post) and thus I rather thought I was onto a winner.  And I really was.  I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it: this is one hearty, mouthwatering, flavoursome meal; simple and pleasing to make, and wonderful with a bowl of basmati rice on a warm summer's evening.  Both thumbs up from the whole family.  Here's Alan's recipe:

Ingredients (serves 4):

120ml extra virgin olive oil

750g aubergine, cut into 1.5cm cubes

1 onion, finely chopped

2 celery sticks, fairly finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

500g fresh chopped tomatoes or 2 tins chopped tomatoes

2 tsp sugar 

100g pitted green olives, rinsed and halved

35g capers, rinsed

2 tbsp currants

3 tbsp pine nuts

5 tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method:

1 Heat three tablespoons of the olive oil in a deep, wide non-stick frying pan. When hot, fry half the aubergines on medium heat for 5–7 minutes until golden brown on all sides. Transfer them to a bowl. Add a further three tablespoons of oil to the pan and repeat with the remaining aubergine.

2 Heat the remaining oil in the pan and add the onion, celery and garlic and cook gently for 10–12 minutes until the onions are soft. Add the tomatoes and sugar and continue to cook for 15 minutes, by which time the tomatoes will have completely broken down.

3 Throw the remaining ingredients into the pan along with some generous pinches of salt and some black pepper as well as the fried aubergines. Cook gently on the hob for a further 10 minutes.

4 Top with basil leaves and serve either hot or cold.

It transpired that Alan wanted to feature the recipe in the Stewed! newsletter and so when it arrived in my virtual mailbox a few days later I got a personal thanks in print (above left).  More fool him - the pleasure was all mine!

DISCLAIMER Alan and I have been friends for several years now: in Spring 2009 I spent many a very long Wednesday chopping and potting for him when he was just getting going with what is now one very successful business. I love his food: he even provided B and I with our favourite Persian chicken stew for our wedding guests in January. So although this post is obviously a bit of a plug for Alan and Stewed!, I asked him if I could blog this recipe because I thought it was utterly delicious and very much in need of sharing... and so it's very much a voluntary plug of love.