A dustbin omelette
- rosemary
- Sep 22
- 9 min read
"The way you make an omelet reveals your character." Anthony Bourdain
Well this is last night's omelette, so I am now wondering what it reveals about my character, having found that quote. Not that this was what I was going to write about - although it's an interesting thought that I shall return to.
You may also be dimly aware that there is background thinking going on in my head every now and then about this potential cookbook for the grandkids that I am working on. A book about the various non-thinking things you can throw together with what you have in the fridge. Techniques being the dominant factor - or so I thought before I began. Now I see that what goes with what is also vitally important, and what basic equipment and flavour boosters you might need as well.
One of the fundamental techniques I shall be covering is the omelette and last night's was a particularly good example. It was also a particularly delicious one, and so I decided to feature it today, explaining what I did, with background about omelettes in general - although I have written about various omelettes before.
I make a 'dustibin omelette' on a regular basis - at least once a fortnight I would think. The technique I use today has been refined over the years, from recipes that I faithfully followed in my youth, to a gradual relaxing and refining to suit my character - yes I guess that's what I do.
I'm not sure now where I learnt to make the classic French-style omelette - Omelette aux fines herbes I suppose - although it can be without the herbs. I do remember watching the cooks at the Lyons Tea Houses in London, where we were taken for a treat lunch when we very occasionally went shopping in Oxford Street. They had a glass fronted kitchen where you could watch them expertly whip the eggs, manipulate them gently in the pan and then flip them over with a flourish.
Somewhere or other - I suspect on a cooking show on TV - now who would that have been? Fanny Craddock maybe - I learnt how to tip the pan as the eggs began to set and move the eggs into the centre as the still liquid ones ran around the edge. Watch Jamie do it on his video if you are new to this. I don't remember my mother cooking many omelettes but she must have, and those French housewives surely did. You really have to see somebody doing it to really get the idea, and Jamie is a good teacher, although he had a slightly different technique to the one I learnt. Only slightly though and a perfectly valid way to do it. He also put cheese in his which I never do, but maybe I should. A non-stick pan though is the way to go.
And here, as always happens, I digress slightly. It happened as I was looking for a suitable picture to show how to cook an omelette - a common way of leading me down other paths. I saw this rather beautiful Bear-inspired Boursin omelette - from Kara Bennett on the Tasting Table website for which the finished omelette is stuffed with a Boursin cheese and chives, and has chives and crunched up crisps scattered over the top. But the post has lots of valuable 'how to' pictures and a video too. And doesn't it look gorgeous?
The classic omelette is indeed one of the quickest to make - a mere 5 minutes - a nutritious and delicious meal that anyone can produce with just one lesson.
Serve it with some bread, a salad perhaps, and a glass of wine and what you have is luxury. Classy, tasty and healthy. Well red wine is supposed to be healthy isn't it?
The next step, and one, I have to say, that I have never taken, is the filled omelette. The one where you put a filling of some kind on one half of the omelette whilst you are cooking it, fold it over and serve. As I say I am not really familiar with this kind of omelette, but unless your filling is just cheese as in the Boursin one above, you would have to have cooked the filling so that it was hot as it is placed in the omelette. Which makes this kind of omelette making a slightly longer process. Not much though - maybe just cutting up a few things and heating them in a frying pan for a bit. Which might mean a bit more washing up as well. The potential for 'deploying leftovers' in the filling however, as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says is 'pretty much unlimited' and he gives one rather unexpected example in his Love Your Leftovers book -Spaghetti bolognese omelette and Nagi Maehashi has a version using mushrooms - a very common one.
As far as my omelette evolution goes, I think several years later than my first experiments, Spanish tortillas became all the rage and I decided to have a go, because I'm a potato freak. The version shown here is from Caroline's Cooking but it's just one of thousands out there. Fundamentally this is fried sliced potatoes, mixed with egg, cooked on the base and then flipped over to cook the other side. Tricky and I tried it once I think, but then resorted to - I think Delia's suggestion - to finish the second side under the oven grill.
By now I was a much more experimental cook - and then came the frittata craze which is still with us, which expanded the potato filling to all manner of other stuff. As well as the other stuff - whatever you can think of really - which is why this kind of thing is an obvious subject for my cookbook - as well as the other stuff, it tends to be baked in the oven. Indeed in many cases if you are looking at recipes online they are baked for quite a time and tend to be quite thick - at least as thick as the tortilla. They are two very similar dishes - and there are countless others from around the world - a Persian kuku springs to mind, but I guess the standout feature of the Spanish omelette is that it's just potatoes - although there's a lot of argument about onions as well.
And just to confuse the issue yet more we have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall suggesting a 'crustless tart' - which can indeed just really be a variation on the fritatta theme in that it's just eggs that bind your 'other stuff' together, or it can be a crustless quiche - like this Feta, pea and mint crustless quiche -by Dr. Claire Bailey and Justine Pattinson on the SBS website and the many thousands of other crustless quiches you will find on the net. Put a crust on it and you have quiche - which is perhaps the end of this particular eggy evolution from the simple, indeed plain two or three egg omelette to one of French cuisine's glories - quiche. The difference between a fritatta and a crustless quiche? Maybe the crustless tart or quiche has cream as well as eggs and a fritatta only has eggs? I suspect the boundaries blur every now and then.
So let me go full circle and return to my own constantly changing 'Something and everything omelette' - yes I think that's what I'll call it.
I could give you a recipe, but really it's more of a method than a recipe that is required because the 'other stuff' depends on what I have in the fridge. There, are, however, always potatoes - sometimes leftover roast potatoes or leftover gratin, diced and sometimes an actual raw potato diced, but rarely peeled.
So OK - the recipe of last night's 5 star Something and everything omelette.
Last night I had a few roasted wedges of potato, and also a potato which I had peeled for a gratin but which had been surplus to my needs, and so I wrapped in a bit of gladwrap and stored it in the fridge for a couple of days. Amazingly it was still OK, and needed no further peeling. I diced both kinds of potatoes.
Then I begin with frying the potatoes in a non-stick pan, in whatever oil I feel like using - usually olive oil, but last night a mix of leftover oils and fats, that I collect together in a pyrex container and keep in the fridge. A modern form of dripping I guess. I use a medium sized non-stick frying pan which can also go into the oven. I may also - and last night I did - add a few bits of bacon, salami or ham to the potatoes. Last night it was bacon. When the potatoes are crispish and brown they are removed to a bowl lined with kitchen paper.
I then sauté 'the other stuff' to softened stage. Last night, this was the last bit of a leek - the greenish/yellow top bits, three silver beet stalks, half a diced zucchini, half a tomato sliced and sort of squashed, parsley and stalks from a big bunch of parsley. The zucchini was diced small and the stalks and leek were sliced thinly. I think that was allI used last night, but I could, and possibly should have added in the last little bit of cauliflower that I had. The possibilities are pretty endless really. When I think about it I also had a small amount of a chicken and kale pasta sauce which could have gone in, although I would have had to have cooked it until most of the sauce had evaporated.
While the 'other stuff' was frying I beat my eggs - four - with the rest of the parsley and some chives. For some reason I omitted the crushed garlic that I usually add at this stage. You could also add spices, other herbs and cheese I guess.
The potatoes and bacon were returned to the pan and stirred around a bit until it was all well and truly mixed together and the beaten eggs poured over. When it had all settled into a good solid mix that covered the base of the pan it was put under the grill until it was puffed up and brown at the edges. Done.
Served with a rosé, a green salad put together whilst the omelette was in the oven, and a warmed baguette, it was amazingly delicious - so delicious that I ate over half of it. David had HP on the side, but I don't think it really needed that extra boost. I asked myself at the time, and I still wonder, what on earth it was that made it so tasty. The ingredients were ordinary - some of them either almost tasteless - zucchini, silver beet stalks - and yet I honestly could give it 5 stars. Was it the wine? Was it the fat that it cooked in? Is it just because I'm greedy? Whatever it was, I am rarely disappointed by this particular dish/method - call it what you will - which is also why it's a regular on our dinner table. The only problem is what to transform any leftovers into - other than just heating them up again, or eating them cold, which somehow I never fancy. So check what you have in your fridge and go make a Something and everything omelette. It took me half an hour from the point of looking to see what I had in the fridge, to putting it on the table.
Now did I reveal anything of my character? Thrifty, marginally inventive, but not really - think what Ottolenghi might do - the frittata photograph above is an instagram photo of his and on top of the more ordinary things in it there were barberries and feta. Maybe some cumin too. The method might have been the same but the ingredients were rather more adventurous. And he has other even more adventurous omelette recipes too. What else does it show? - a bit last minute, spur of the moment. I do tend to leave things until the very last moment - and always have. Disorganised in the sense that I have far too many vegetables in the fridge because I can't resist buying them. But quite organised in the sense that doing this kind of dish is relatively easy for me. Lazy even. As for my tastebuds. Probably not very selective. My wine-maker friend in Adelaide used to say I was his 'ordinary' drinker test. Hmm.
YEARS GONE BY
September 22
2023 - 'Lush' - Welsh food
2022 - Normality - a Coles shop
2021 - Nothing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Red cabbage
2018 - Cooking with beer
"Something and Everything Omlette" - now that is a tiltle worth patenting! And it was delcious with just that dash of hp on the side... well it is an everything omlette! 🥰