Island
Living 46: An Omelette to Remember
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
I’m writing
this from Las Vegas, where I’m presently teaching
at the University of Nevada and living in a faculty
suite in a student dorm. Escaping the New York winter,
for which my karma has substituted an unseasonably
chilly period here -- even rainy, overcast, gray
some of the time. But still warmer than back home
right now.
This two-room
apartment has everything I could ask for except
cooking facilities. For those purposes it offers
a mini-fridge and microwave, period. I can’t
afford to eat out every night, and what surrounds
the campus, predictably, are mostly fast-food outlets.
So I’ve purchased an electric wok, a blender,
a toaster-oven, and a rice cooker, enabling me to
prepare adequate basic meals. But I don’t have
my pantry, my spice rack, my utensils, serious refrigerator
space . . . so, while I’m not even a little
homesick after six weeks out here, I really miss
my kitchen.
Last night,
while heating up some canned soup, I recalled a
meal I made before I left in mid-January. As a bachelor,
I cook for myself all the time, of course, but I
do so perfunctorily, for the most part. I enjoy
cooking for others, always have, going back to my
childhood when my parents trained me to make them
Sunday morning breakfast in bed. I loved doing that,
coordinating bacon and pancakes or waffles and juice
and coffee, and thought it wonderful that I could
have this competence and fine that my parents could
enjoy the luxury of it. (I’ve since made breakfast
in bed for many people. I can count the number of
times people have breakfast in bed for me on the
fingers of my two hands.)
Arrangements
for this stretch of time away preoccupied me in
early January, so I hadn’t made myself a meal
(as distinguished from simply putting together something
for myself to eat) in some time. I’d done a
bit of shopping that afternoon, half an hour in
the Rosebank A&P, but I actually hadn’t
thought about dinner, hadn’t bought anything
for it. So I came downstairs from the office around
7 p.m. fully expecting simply to throw something
together once again. Pamila, my just-arrived house-sitter
from Toronto, was going out to spend the evening
with a friend, so there wasn’t even the opportunity
to cook for her as a motivation.
I think what
actually sparked the end result were the new plates.
Down near the St, George ferry terminal I’d
passed, on the bus, several times, Fish’s Eddy,
a job-lot ceramics outlet run out of a former car-repair
shop. From the bus windows I’d seen it and
wondered -- just a bare, undecorated cement cubicle
with a roll-down metal front, nothing fancy. One
Friday afternoon, while on an errand in Tompkinsville,
I’d taken the opportunity to stop in.
I was just looking,
had only fourteen dollars with me, didn’t expect
to buy anything. The dishes were simply stacked
around -- on the floor, on top of upturned crates,
on a few tables. There was a rough counter with
stacks of newspaper for wrapping, plastic grocery
sacks for carrying, a cellotape wrapping gun. The
man behind it looked busy. I started to browse.
Restaurant ware,
exclusively, mostly ceramics with some glassware.
All new, but broken lots and seconds. Plates, cups,
saucers, side dishes, platters. Heavy-duty, hard-to-break
stuff, the kind I’ve always liked and picked
up frequently in second-hand stores: It doesn’t
break easily, or often, and has a reassuring solidity.
Beyond that, I associate it with diners, with the
idea of simple, ample fare, breakfast on the road.
I don’t need to draw you a picture.
Roaming around
this space, about twenty feet square, I marked some
areas worthy of further investigation as I took
a rough survey of the options. In passing, I met
the eye of the manager, nodded and exchanged a grunted
hello. He continued his work.
Eventually,
after about ten minutes, I concentrated my attention
on the area to the left of the door as one walks
in. It had stacks of big dinner plates, eight or
nine stacks, each about 18 incheshigh. These plates
were made of the same vitreous china, but they were
not the traditional diner plates. These were the
new dinner plates of the ‘80s and ‘90s:
about the size of an LP record, 12 inches or so
across, with wide, variously decorated borders.
The areas to hold the food measured about nine inches
across. Most of them had no mates, or only one or
two. He’d priced them at two dollars each.
I love those
plates. They represent a kind of cuisine that’s
a mix between the comfort-food aspect of the diner
and the elegance of nouvelle cuisine. They’re
a form of frame for food as art, the decoratively
organized one-dish meal -- our era’s version
of the blue-plate special. At the same time, their
proportions are such that they guarantee ample quantity.
I suppose they also make me think of my estranged
son, Edward, the chef.
In any case,
I spent some time going through these plates. I
decided that I didn’t want a matching set,
but a mixed lot, so I ended up picking out four,
each distinctive, each different. I also found an
oval platter that appealed to me, in a quite different
pattern, and a small round plate with a green fleur-de-lis
motif. The lot came to ten dollars, no tax. The
vendor put paper between the four plates, wrapped
them around twice with plastic tape, taped the platter
and smaller plate together, stuck the lot in a double
plastic grocery bag, and I departed.
They sat on
a chair in my kitchen all weekend. Then I took them
out, washed them, and admired them. They stood waiting
in the drying rack this particular evening when
I came into the kitchen.
What I had on
hand for ingredients included several eggs, half
an avocado, a red onion, a sweet red pepper, some
fresh sour cream from the supermarket. In the refrigerator
I found also a last slice of broiled New Jersey
tomato that needed eating soon.
I sliced the
pepper and the onion on the cutting board, poured
the juice from the broiled tomatoes into a small
frying pan, amplified it with a few spoonsful of
olive oil, and added the cut vegetables -- all the
pepper, half the onion. I minced the other half-onion
more finely and put it into a ceramic bowl, one
of a pair that my friend Nina and I had purchased
during our three-month stay in Tucson several years
ago.
I cracked two
eggs one-handed, a trick I taught myself a few years
back (girls go wild) and put them into a small shaker,
to which I added a few spoonsful of cool water and
some tarragon. Shook it up and let it sit. Pitted
and peeled the half avocado, cut it into chunks,
threw it on top of the minced onion, augmented it
with a slosh of bottled lemon juice, some garlic
salt, and several hearty jolts of salsa habañera.
Smushed it up with a potato masher for a slightly
chunky guacamole.
After checking
the simmering vegetables, I added to them that remaining
tomato slice. I took my omelette pan off the hook
by the stove, set a high flame going beneath it,
threw in a pat of butter and, once it melted and
began to bubble, shook the eggs again and poured
them in, covering the pan with a handy enameled
pot lid.
So far none
of this was extraordinary. But I went to pick out
a plate, decided to use one of the new ones, put
it down on the table, and something changed.
The omelette
cooked up fast, I could smell it getting crisp,
just the way I like it. I’d planned to put
some sour cream inside it and fold it in half, but
its circular shape clicked in my head, so instead
I flipped it over to brown slightly on the other
side. I turned the heat off under the vegetables.
Once the omelette was nicely firm and slightly toasted
underneath, I slid it onto the new plate, whose
rim bore a kind of vaguely folk-art, arguably southwestern
motif in black and white. It fit perfectly, a golden-brown
circle, with a thin circle of white ceramic between
it and the plate’s rim.
Onto the center
of the omelette I scooped a layer of the red vegetables,
clustered in the middle. In the center of that diversely
red area I dropped a goodly gob of pure white sour
cream. And around the edges, between the omelette
and the border, I placed dollops of the guacamole.
Then I sat down
to admire my handiwork and eat my dinner. I gave
it my full attention. It turned out both beautiful
and delicious, and I took great pleasure in eating
it.
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©
Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
Syndication Services,
P.O.B. 040078, Staten Island, New York 10304-0002
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