Guest Post: Omlette de Fraise

The Chicken’s family has been noticing how often he gets roasted on this blog but I promise, it is all true. So this time when he did something spectacularly chickenish, I decided to let him tell the story. I should also mention that the night before, I served for shabbas dinner: hallah bread, white wine, homemade french onion soup, potatoes, carrots and a whole roasted chicken with rosemary, thyme and sage. The whole thing looked like a painting by Christopher Flodberg. I will admit the gravy was a complete failure: I accidentally grabbed the ground cloves instead of pepper. Perfect I am not, but James takes culinary imperfection to a whole new level. Coming straight from The Chicken's beak:

A common reaction from people who don’t understand something is to belittle it, and my wife Janet is no exception when it comes to my cooking technique. Case in point: my ongoing study of omelettes. For the past month or so on Saturday mornings, it’s been my appointed task to cook omelettes for the two of us. Not coincidentally, this means that Janet gets to spend some extra time sleeping in while I slave away in front of the stove. I actually don’t mind too much because I get to indulge my whims and curiosity without The Wife looking over my shoulder at every turn and bossing me around.

A lot of people have compared a kitchen to a laboratory, and I’m inclined to agree. In my laboratory there’s all these neat bottles of reagents, catalysts, and solvents and the mark of any chemist worth his NaCl is the burning question: “what happens when I add these things together?”. A kitchen is no different. When you consider all the meat, fruits, veggies, and spices we have available in our well-stocked kitchen (a far cry from my bachelor pad in Cambridge, I’ll admit) what self-respecting chemist wouldn’t get excited about all the culinary possibilities?
About a month ago I was charged with the task of making my first omelette. My advice from Janet was the following: “Beat some eggs, add milk, cheese and veggies”. Then she went back to sleep. After I beat the four eggs, chopped up the necessary veggies, and prepared a small pile of yummy salty Bulgarian cheese, I was faced with a question: How much milk to add? I wasn’t sure. I settled on a nice even number: one cup. As was described here earlier, the result was a very pouffy culinary masterpiece, albeit admittedly somewhat difficult to flip. “Wow!” I thought. “Look at the effect of adding all that milk! I made a soufflé! That’s really cool!” Excitedly, I roused Janet from her slumber.

“You added HOW much milk?”, she growled.

“One cup”, I said.

Several minutes later, after she picked her jaw from off the floor and wiped away the tears of laughter, she went and wrote a blog post about how dumb I was in the kitchen. Welcome to my life, dear reader.

The next week I was excited about another omelette adventure. OK, I thought. One cup was too much. What if I add about a quarter of that. The result was similar: quite pouffy, albeit a bit more easily handled. Janet ate the omelette, but added plenty of ketchup.
In the kitchen this Saturday morning I decided to go the full monty (figuratively, not literally – don’t worry) and add no milk at all. If I was really doing careful kitchen science I would have kept all the variables the same. But life is short, and you don’t get to cook multiple omelettes in the kitchen the way you can set up multiple reactions in the lab. So I changed two variables at once. After adding the chopped up peppers, I decided to go out on a limb and add another component: strawberries. Strawberries are pretty yummy after all.

My strawberry omelette went rather well in fact. I noticed that it wasn’t pouffy at all, and it flipped very nicely. When it was done, I gave Janet an excited high-five. “Wow chicken!” she exclaimed. But as she looked past the stove to the countertop, her smile quickly faded.

“Did you add strawberries?”.
“Yep”, I said.
She was silent, her eyes wide open, staring at the omelette.
“Is that bad?” I asked.

The result, as usual, was peals of laughter and having to endure about fifteen minutes of wife-ly haranguing about what a bad cook I am. Apparently adding strawberries to omelettes is a big faux pas. Well how was I supposed to know about that dumb rule? Since she refused to eat her portion, I had to eat the whole strawberry omelette, OK, I’ll it wasn’t the best omelette I’d ever had, but whatever. What’s the point of having all these ingredients if you don’t experiment and add new ingredients together? If you ask me, I think she is trapped in her little world of strict by-the-book cooking, while I am exploring bold new realms of gastronomic adventure. I am already excitedly planning my next omelette experiment.