I don't like eggs. I never have, and I probably never will. Until recently, even the smell of scrambled eggs or omelets cooking was enough to make me lose my appetite (and almost more). So when I was starting to get into cooking, I never bothered to learn how to make eggs: scrambled, poached, sunny-side-up, omelets, I wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole. But this weekend the Suitor was recovering from laser eye surgery, and I wanted to make him breakfast. His favorite breakfast fare: omelets.
So I did plenty of reading, watched the Good Eats episode on omelets, took plenty of notes, and felt more or less ready. Couldn't be that hard, right? And in truth, making an omelet isn't hard. I warmed the eggs in hot water for five minutes to allow them to cook faster, I added a bit of milk to the beaten egg to make it fluffier, I made sure all the fillings were cooked and at room temperature (or heated), and I didn't have any trouble finding the balance between not browning the outside too much and allowing the inside to cook enough. And when all was said and done, the Suitor proclaimed my omelet very tasty and well cooked.
My problem is in presentation. Now, maybe this will just take practice, but the whole folding-in-thirds thing? Yeah, didn't work out so well, mostly because the egg tore. I made two omelets for him, one Sunday and one Monday, and both of them tore. The second one tore less catastrophically, but it still tore. Does anyone out there have experience making omelets and/or have any advice on how I can avoid future tears? I assume that, like "ride more," "make more omelets" is a large part of the answer, but if there's anything I'm doing wrong, I'd love to fix it.
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I didn't want to buy stencils. I really didn't. See, I'm making this cake--which I'll post later--and had an idea for decorating it: since today, potluck day, is the day after Valentine's Day, I thought I'd put heart shapes on it instead of the snowflakes that Bon Appetit's bakers used. And instead of doing them as powdered sugar standing out on a dusting of cocoa powder on top of the cake, I wanted to make thin little bittersweet chocolate hearts and arrange them on top of the cake (with or without a dusting of cocoa powder). I chose bittersweet chocolate so that when they cooled and hardened they would be fairly rigid.
The problem, aside from the fact that I don't have a chillable marble slab at my disposal, is that the only way I've ever seen something like this done is with a stencil that's about 0.5-1 mm thick: you lay the stencil down on your work surface, use a spatula to spread chocolate over it, carefully lift up the stencil, and voila! A nice, neat chocolate heart--or star, or gingerbread man, or whatever shape you're using. And I don't have any stencils, heart shaped or otherwise. Nor do I have heart-shaped cookie cutters.
So this afternoon when I got home from work I started looking around the house for materials I could use to make a stencil. Apparently I don't have any such materials. I have some bits of plastic, but they're too tough to cut with the level of accuracy that I want (jagged hearts are not what I'm going for). Parchment paper is easy to cut, but too flimsy to be of any practical use, as I found out when I tried to spread chocolate over it and ended up finding chocolate underneath the stencil as well as on top of it (smeared, unrecognizable hearts are not what I'm going for, either).
And then--and then!--I realized that my offset spatula, which I was using to spread the chocolate in the first place, has a rounded tip. Rounded in such a way that, given that the spatula itself is about 1" thick, the tip is the perfect shape to be the left half of the top of a heart (if that makes any sense). And so I experimented: I dipped the spatula into the chocolate and got a bit on the underside of the tip; then I touched it just gently to the silpat that I had waiting on a cookie sheet (the better to refrigerate, if necessary), and brought it back such that there was a streak with a rounded tip. It's tough to explain, but maybe a picture would help:
The ones at the bottom are quite a bit neater--obviously they were the last ones I did.
Anyway, that was my stroke of brilliance--nothing that hasn't been invented before, I'm sure, but I'm pleased so far with the results: the free-form hearts are nicer looking (if less perfect) than ones made from a boring old stencil, as they're flowy and have some texture to them. The form isn't perfect, and it's a little difficult to get a nice point at the bottom, but they should do the job nicely. Now, if only I can get them off the silpat without breaking them... stay tuned!
This is another tip I saw on the Food Network, but I can't remember whose show it was. I have on more than one occasion (in the last two months, even) had chile oil on my hands and, either forgetting it's on my hands or thinking I'd washed it off, subsequently gotten it on various sensitive parts of my face: upper lip, skin right below my eye, and so on. Not so much fun, especially when one is dealing with "whoa, Nellie" hot Thai chile peppers.
Well, apparently you can use baking soda to take care of it. According to one Food Network host whose name escapes me, it neutralizes the spicy components of the oil, or helps remove them, or something--I can't quite remember what--point being, it solves the problem. If I remember correctly, you wash your hands with a mixture of baking soda and water. Admittedly I haven't tried it, but I will the next time I deal with hot peppers.
This is a tip I saw on the Food Network recently. Despite the fact that my kitchen remains the most fully furnished room in my apartment, I do not own both a spice grinder and a coffee grinder. In fact, I don't have either. I have a mortar and pestle and a Cuisinart mini-mate, but I do not actually have a spice grinder. And I don't have an espresso machine (something I would really like to change), so a coffee grinder has not been something I've needed. Anyway, I have not actually had occasion to make use of this particular kitchen tip, but it's something I've often wondered about, so I wanted to pass it on.
For those lucky chefs who have separate spice and coffee grinders, skip this post--you don't need it. For those of you who have one grinder that serves as both a spice grinder and a coffee grinder, this is for you. When you've finished grinding whatever you're grinding, whether spices or coffee, get a piece of bread and stick it in the grinder. Let it whiz around for a while, then dump out the contents. Supposedly this will clean out all the little bits of coffee bean or whatever spice you've been grinding. I have a feeling it might not always work perfectly on the first try, but it sounds like a neat idea. So, give it a go and see if it works. Can't hurt, right?