eggs

Mise en place or…buy another cake mix

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Once upon a time there was a lovely young woman called Maryann.  She had dark chestnut coloured hair (at that time…although now it’s purply-brown and was at one point very blonde and at times quite auburn) and ka-ka-brown cow eyes.  Her smile was as large as Steven Tyler’s and she was very happy.  There was one thing that Maryann hoped to do one day and that was to bake and decorate a chocolate cake.  On this particularly sunny day, her wish came true.  The ending, however, was not what she had expected.

Maryann was thrilled to finally have a kitchen of her own.  She had moved out of her parental home and was now in an apartment with her sweetheart, Wiseguy.  It was also her sweetie’s birthday soon and she was going to bake him a lovely cake!  Now, she knew that she had to start slow with her new hobby of baking so she decided to play it safe.  She purchased a box of Duncan Hines chocolate fudge cake mix and debated purchasing the sugary, sweet frosting as well, but then decided that she would impress her loved one by topping her gloriously, chocolatey cake with REAL whipped cream.  Yes!  She would buy that 35% whipping cream, and make billowy, thick pillows of creamy goodness.  Maryann also bought some candles and, to make it fun, cake writing gel to write “Happy Birthday” on it!  What a wonderful surprise it would be for her hubby!

“Ok,” she began reading, “preheat oven to 350 degrees”.  She opened the oven door to ensure that there was nothing inside.  Why?  Because one day, at her mother-in-law’s house, she turned on the stove, smelled something funny after a little while and realized that there were pans with oil in the stove.  YIKES!  Lesson learned and etched her happy little brain.

“Next I need to put contents of package into a bowl and add one cup water, 1/3 cup vegetable oil, and 3 eggs.”  She had heard about this thing called mise en place which in French means something like “everything in it’s place”, but in cooking it means “make sure you have all your ingredients out and ready to go and also your measuring cups and measuring spoons and baking dishes…basically everything you need to make this cake should be right in front of you.”  The pretty Maryann got out her measuring cup.  She poured the oil into the cup (exactly 1/3 cup) and put it into the mixing bowl with the cake mix.  Next, she poured one cup water into the measuring cup.  Perfect!  Into the bowl it went.  She heard the oven ‘beep’ letting her know that the oven was preheated to 350 degrees.  Yay!  Time to get mixing!

She whipped that batter with an electric mixer.   A couple of taste tests to remind her of her childhood.  After a few minutes she stopped the mixing and eased her lovely greased cake pan closer to the bowl.  She emptied the fluid, chocolate contents into the cake pan.  With her spatula she tried to get every last bit out of the bowl into the cake pan to make sure she had a nice, big cake for Wiseguy.  Tap, tap, tap to even it out and then into the oven it went.  She set the timer for 30 minutes (it was a rectangular 9″ x 13″ pan).  She couldn’t wait until it was done!

Time passed.  The timer finally chirped.  Her birthday cake was ready to come out of the oven and cool for a bit.  Oh the excitement!  Oh the pride!  She had done it!  She opened the oven door and…ohhhh….she had done it alright.  Her cake was almost flat!  How could she possibly screw up a boxed cake mix?  Really?  Seriously?  Was she never going to learn to bake anything?  Sadly, with her oven-mitted hands, she pulled out her pancake-style chocolate birthday cake and sighed.  She gently laid rest her unfortunate experiment on the stove top to cool.  Maybe it could be salvaged somehow.  If it tasted good then all was well.  Taste is one thing, but…

After 15 minutes she tried to cut out a piece.  It crumbled in her hands.  Huh?  It tasted fine, but it all fell apart, like cereal out of its box.  The lovely Maryann had to admit that she would never, ever be a baker of anything.  She went back to her kitchen counter to gather up everything to wash when she noticed something odd.

Three large size eggs were sitting on her counter.  Why were there eggs on her counter?  Had she taken them out to make something else?  She HAD put those other 3 eggs into her cake mix right?  She looked at them.  With the suddenness of a swooping eagle going for its prey, Maryann realized, “Oh my!  I forgot the eggs.”  Yes, if you look back to paragraph 4 (it begins with “Next I need to”) you will indeed see that after the ‘ding’ of the oven the eggs were omitted prior to the exuberant mixing.

There you have it.  The story of the lovely Maryann and her first attempt to bake something.  She didn’t give up though.  She now bakes cookies, pies, pretzels, oh and boxed cake mixes.  Maryann learned from her mistake, was grateful to have learned it and is now excited when trying new recipes.  Mise en place is her motto and way of baking and cooking.

Moral of the story:  If at first you don’t succeed, be grateful that you had the mistake to learn from and use it to make greater things in your life.

or

If at first you don’t succeed remember “mise en place”, buy another cake mix and ADD THE EGGS FIRST!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passion Is In Fashion!

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I like to live dangerously!  The thrill of zip-lining, or the rush of rock climbing.  Running a marathon.  Hiking through Europe.  Bike stunts.  Skateboarding tricks.  My goodness there are so many exhilarating moments!  Hot air balloon rides and white water rafting!  Honestly, the list is endless.  I am quite the daredevil and proud of it.  Hopefully, through my brave, adventurous life, you too will find that hidden childhood desire and live an inspiring and fulfilled life like I do.  Oh, by the way, I have never done any of these listed things, but I do find ways to live on the edge.

I ate bacon four times last week.  Yes, yes, I did and I’m not ashamed to brag about it.  Do you know what else?  I had a sunny side up fried egg to go with it.  There was also toast AND, oh yeah, it was buttered.  Booyah!  How do you like me now?  Uh huh.  I know.  I can almost palpably feel your envy at my exploits into endangerment.  Why am I being so foot loose and fancy free?

As a child I remember being unencumbered by my mortality.  I am sure you have seen kidlets jumping on a bed…up and down, and up and down, and…oops…BANG!  Too close to the edge.  Some bawling, either from actually bumping their head or just the shock of being misplaced.  Other than that they learn that they need to stay closer into the middle.  Lesson learned and more fun to be had.  How about the one year old that stands on the couch pulling at the blinds?  Yup, you know where this is going.  What makes them do such dumb things?

Are they dumb?  To us adults we can all become the Amazing Kreskin and foresee what shall happen (due to our own misfortunes and miscalculations), but to them it’s about exploring life.  That couch is their Mount Everest!  That bed is their trampoline!  Nowadays children have be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  There is no longer places for them to play alone.   They can’t even go play on the jungle gym at the park without adult supervision.  I actually feel sorry for them.  Sorry that they can’t have that freedom of adventure that we had as children.

I believe my days in the summer went something like this:  wake up and have breakfast.  Out of the house so that my mother could clean.  Meet with kids in the neighbourhood and play until someone’s mother called for them.  Lunchtime!  Rush home.  Eat lunch.  Run out the door again to play.  Someone would hear the holler of dinnertime and again…home to be fed and then out to play.  No adults were with us.  No teenagers were with us.  We got to goof off and do silly things like fall out of trees or go wandering around the forest and be amazed to see a dead rabbit.  (Two little bites in the neck.  We thought there were vampires nearby).  We would come home sweaty, dusty, or muddy… and exhausted.

As we became adults the “fun” goofy things were replaced by order and rules.  School had rules.  Jobs had rules.  Society had rules.  So many rules and so little place to have fun.  We are told, in many different ways, how we should think and what we should believe.  Commercials tell us what will make us happiest.  Buy their product and your life will be full of sunshine, roses, and unicorns.  Ahhhhh…how great our lives will be.

Weird thing is, and you might have noticed this, it seems that this is kind of where we become like children again.  We beg and pine for something and know that our lives will be incredible once we get it.  That “it” could be anything from something expensive like a car or something as simple as a hamburger.  Now, if you really think about it, that lasts for a bit and then suddenly, it’s not good enough.  There is something else you absolutely need in order to make your life the happiest thing ever!  In most cases, the feeling goes away quite quickly.  How can you change this?

Find your inner happiness.  Find your inner love.  Once you find that crazy happy place, the world around you will seem so much better.  It won’t matter what material things you have because the rest of the world will just seem so much more beautiful, colourful, alive.  Those “rose-coloured glasses” of your youth were removed by well-meaning adults, but it’s time for you to put those on again.  The world is a remarkable place, but we tend to look at what is missing in our lives and not what we already have.

Live with passion!  Live with a sense of excitement!  Find out what makes you happy and do it!  Who cares what other people think!  Those who live with a sense of adventure, spirit, and joy are the ones who are finding that gold nugget of excitement in their lives.  PASSION IS IN FASHION!

P.S.  Did I mention that egg was fried in the bacon fat?  Oh yeah…I’m living recklessly.

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Yolks on you…

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I am a lover of eggs.  Eating eggs, that is.  I appreciate the variety of meals that can be made with eggs.  Restaurants caught onto this and started putting eggs on hamburgers.  Oh yes, the value of that golden, runny yolk is something to behold.  You would think that with all my culinary experiences in making appetizers and main meals that I would have a stellar advantage when making myself eggs for breakfast.  Sadly, the truth remains that the simple egg always seems to find a way to make me fowl up (haha, get it?) my breakfast plan.

My initial favourite type of egg for breakfast was the over easy egg.  As a child, my mother would make this ideal breakfast for me.  Mom’s recipe:

  1. Put a gallon of oil in the pan
  2. Crack egg shell with side of fork and drop egg into swimming pool of oil
  3. Use a spatula to splash boiling hot oil over the egg yolk
  4. Remove egg once there is a white film on yolks and yolks are still runny

What would happen if a yolk broke?  Well, that was the end of my day.  (I still believe this to be true.)  I used to gently nudge my fork tines against that whitened outer yolk and watch as the liquid began cascading around the rest of the fried egg white.  Every part of that egg needed to have yolk on it.  Of course, there were many other ways that she prepared this delicacy.

Sometimes a soft boiled egg.  What if she over-cooked it and the yolk slightly hardened?  Doomsday.  Hard boiled eggs...yummy!  Devilled eggs were the bonus to the hardboiled egg.  Eggs and mayonnaise!   My heart is screaming listening to its arteries harden.  Scrambled.  I didn’t like scrambled eggs at first.  They always seemed rubbery and had no flavour.  That was until Breakfast Man came into my life.  My beloved Wiseguy is Breakfast Man!  He can make any kind of egg I desire and it’s PERFECTLY PERFECT every time!  (Maybe fate brought us together for just for this reason.)  What kind of breakfast can Breakfast Man make?

Scrambled eggs.  My goodness they are fluffy and creamy and buttery and…are you salivating yet?  Yes, they are that good.  Eggs over easy?  You can shake the plate and watch those yolks jiggle with delight.  Omelette.   When Breakfast Man makes a cheese omelette you never know what kind of surprise you will find inside.  Spinach?  Mushrooms? Peppers? Chunks of leftover barbecued chicken?  Genius!  The fridge is Wiseguy’s muse; waiting for him to pluck something from obscurity and lead it into Breakfast Nirvana.  I know, I know, I sound like I have never eaten eggs before, but when you have had eggs prepared by Breakfast Man, you would drool as well.  Now, I told you these wonderfully, appetizing tales to share with you what happened yesterday when my breakfast desire was to make a nice soft boiled egg.

I put the egg in the pot of boiling water.  The egg cracked!  Darn it!  I pulled out a second egg, lost my grip and it fell on the counter.  Slight crack.  AAAARRRRGHHHHH!  Well, I turned off the pot of water and decided to make sunny side up eggs.  So, I took out a THIRD egg to add to my hairline fractured egg in hopes that one of them would turn out with a nice, runny yolk.  I added butter to my pan and the two eggs.  They fried for a bit and put the lid on the pan to steam them.   I put a nice thick slice of bread into the toaster.  I made myself a tea.  I LOST TRACK OF TIME AND OVERCOOKED THE EGGS!  The whites were rubbery.  The yolks were hard.  Prediction:  crappy day.  I was irked by my failure to procure the perfect yolk.  I severed one of the eggs and put into a container hoping I’d MacGyver it tomorrow morning via breakfast sandwich.  I decided to add the boiled egg to that mess.  I started to peel off the shell and discovered that the yolk was soft.  Perfectly cooked.  How did I miss that?

I am sure you have had days like that.  You might be a horoscope reader so you peruse your prediction for the day.  It says you will have challenges.  What happens?  You fulfill that destiny.  You have a crappy day because your horoscope said so.  My awful eggs?  I was predicting that I would screw them up and so I thought I had.  In my despair I had actually overlooked the good that had happened by focusing on all the bad that I had endured.

I think life is like my egg cooking journey.  (It’s a stretch but follow along.)  There are so many things we want perfect in our lives.  Perfection means we have control and can make sure everything is in its place.  We wake up wanting to be happy, but more often than not, we focus on all the things that are wrong and that need to be fixed in order to make our lives better.  If we actually stopped and focused on all the marvellous things in our lives, we would find the gold nugget (or egg yolk).  That little thing that would put a smile on our faces and make the things that aren’t perfect seem less awful.  Nugget by little nugget, we would find our lives becoming happier and our imperfect nuggets would not be as devastating.  There may be hard cooked times you are going through, but there is also a soft centre that will make you happy and comfortable and appreciative.  (Ok, ok enough with the eggsplanations.  haha!)

“May your life always be sunny side up!”  I think that’s what my egg was trying to tell me.  Then again, it might have been laughing hysterically and thinking:  “Yolks on you!”  Either way, it got me smiling.