Year / 2007

by Edward Champion

The Omelette Report

Some culinary skills come late in life. But they do, in the end, arrive, if you are pigheaded enough. (Of course a desire to feed people is a great motivator too.)

omelet.jpgAs I reported rather discreetly back in September, I finally figured out how to make a pretty tasty omelette. Yes, I learned in my early thirties. But in my defense, I should note that on the breakfast front, I had the scrambled eggs, pancakes, and onion-potatoes thing down pretty well — in part because I worked as a short-order cook in my early twenties. (The manager, discovering my ineptitude, eventually stopped giving me morning shifts. Which was fine back in those days, seeing as how I was dilatory and frequently hungover just after sunrise back in those days. I’ve since taken to getting up very early in the morning to get a good start.)

But there were also ancillary factors. During my early twenties, as a last resort, I used my crude breakfast making skills as a desperate bargaining chip to get into bed with women. It worked twice, although in both cases the women in question were somewhat inebriated. Maybe they just felt sorry for me. This was one of the reasons I related to Pirate Prentice’s Banana Breakfast in the early pages of Gravity’s Rainbow. It seemed stemmed from the same hapless masculinity.

But the omelette thing befuddled me. Until recently, when I became determined to eat the majority of my meals in rather than out.

So that other anonymous souls suffering this same problem might be granted succor, here are some helpful hints.

First off, you need to make sure that you have a good egg base. And this means having a good omelette pan. My sister, knowing of my ontological omelette imbroglio, was kind enough to give me a Calphalon 12-inch pan for my last birthday, and the slick non-stick surface, carefully buttered, makes whipping up and cooking an omelette easier than if you have a standard issue shitty frying pan. One other thing about the omelette pan. It’s great for a well-cooked four-egg omelette, which you can then slice delicately down the middle and serve for two. So if you’re serious about omelettes, get this pan. Plus, it has a thick oblong steel handle that makes you feel as if you’re driving a fucking sports car or something. And if you’re thinking that this is some kind of scam, it isn’t. You can use it for other things. It’s also great for chicken quesadillas.

Now you need to be absolutely scrupulous about cooking the egg. And you can do this quite fine with a fork. You bat down the light rising bubbles with the back of the fork, while gently scraping the cooked edge away from the side. When you see a well-cooked edge, be sure to tilt the pan so that the egg on top will flow just underneath the egg. The fork is handy because you’ll be able to lift the congealed egg and that’s where the magic happens!

Keep doing this for a while until 90% of the uncooked egg are underneath the edges. If you’re thorough like me, you’ll want to lift up the entire elliptical perimeter and make sure it’s all cooked. (Plus, this will help when you get to the tricky flip.)

You’re going to need a good deal of cheese to lay down. Ideally, if you shred some gouda or some feta, you’re in for a tasty breakfast! A smidgen of fresh, meticulously ground parsley goes with this well too, although you’ll probably want to mix this into the base. But be sure that you have enough cheese! Because this cheese is going to save your ass when you get to the inside of the omelette.

Now the tricky part. The filling. In my early omelette experiments, I was so eager to make a great omelette that I often employed too much zeal here, and I learned some harsh lessons in applying grand dollops down the middle. Be sparing here. Because if you have too much filling, then it’s going to be a pain in the ass when you flip the egg over. And not only that, but you’re really going to need to make sure the inside of the omelette is cooked, with the cheese melting into it magically.

You may need to make about two or three omelettes to get the filling-to-egg ratio right, but once you have this down, your omelette will rock.

Now flipping the egg over can be a bitch. You’re going to need the fork and you’re going to need a spatula. You’ll need the fork to lift up the edge, which you can then slide over very carefully with the spatula. And if you have your filling-to-egg ratio right, you shouldn’t have much of a problem if you use considerable solicitude on this front.

Then you’ll just want to keep the puppy cooking. But don’t leave it one place. You’re going to want to move the omelette around every minute for presentation purposes. After all, the last thing anyone wants when eating an omelette is a dun-colored bottom. But you will need to cook this thoroughly. When you see some thoroughly melted cheese emerging from the edge, chances are you’re done.

And voila! A grand omelette that should keep you going until the early afternoon at least!

The whole thing costs maybe $3 to make. A few bucks more if you want to get extravagant. Throw in some potatoes, some fruit, a toasted English muffin with grape jelly, and you’ll have yourself a grand breakfast. (And to think, they’re charging $10 for this racket at a diner!)

by Edward Champion

A Tumultuous Privacy of Storm

The Register: “This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy – that there isn’t any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody’s email at any time without a warrant.”

by Edward Champion

Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show

Correspondent: I’m wondering, in your research, did you find a kind of Miles-like figure who was occupying the public sanatorium, as opposed to a private one? Were there many of these types of figures?

abarrett.jpgBarrett: There were a lot of wealthy people in cure cottages. I didn’t find someone like Miles. He’s really wholly invented. But the American Protective League is real. That institution that he belongs to was real and very powerful during the early part of World War I. So I really built him from my knowledge of people in cure cottages, which I had written about before in a story called “The Cure” in Servants of the Map. And then from what I found out about the American Protective League.

Correspondent: Gotcha. The sessions that Miles conducts are rather interesting because we don’t actually know all the time what’s being reported in those sessions. You reproduce a rather bland page-long sentence of some of the things that are discussed, but I found that to be kind of an interesting decision in light of the first-person plural narration, which we haven’t even begun to discuss. I’m wondering why you kept that sort of disguise. Was it a way to foreshadow the inevitable revelation as to who this narrator is?

Barrett: This collective narrator — usually when we read something that starts off with a “we” voice, we’re waiting for it to separate out into an “I.” And that is the case for most stories. This doesn’t right through the very end, and there’s a reason for that. And partly the reason is that, as a group, those people do something — or, in some cases, fail to do something — about which they feel really guilty. So they’re not willing to separate out. The reason for reproducing what they’re talking about so literally is partly to give you a sense of the real texture of their lives and what they’re really learning. There was a tendency then — and there’s still a tendency now — to think that recent immigrants to this country, if they’re working in menial jobs, aren’t educated and don’t have complicated intellectual lives. And that’s just silly. It was silly then and it’s silly now. The workmen’s circles, which is what that discussion group is based on, was very common in New York. Especially on the Lower East Side. People talked about them in great depth and with great rigor after very long days working horrible jobs about the Yiddish theater, about French music, about painting, about all sorts of things. And I thought that just to describe those things, to tell about those things really briefly, would in a sense be unbelievable. That I needed to reproduce for you some of the texture of that. So that you could fully imagine what it was like to really have those discussions.

Correspondent: I think there’s also a mystery of not discussing the full minutes of the agenda. Were there two green volumes that you actually found during the course of your research?

Barrett: I have those two green volumes.

Correspondent: Really?

Barrett: Yeah. I have the books that Leo works from and I know them almost as well as Leo does at this point. I don’t actually know any chemistry. But I do know…

Correspondent: Come on! Cite something at the top of your head right now!

Barrett: I can’t. I just can’t. But I could when I was writing the book.

This conversation with Andrea Barrett will appear on a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show.

by Edward Champion

No Harm

As with any human brain, my own has glaring deficiencies. Whole cavities of knowledge that I hope to fill. Proper restitution of the immediate territories reveals still more estival pores occupied by pop music lyrics, needlessly pedantic refs to events from twenty years ago, and other lithe, trunk-clad, mnemonic divers hoping their swan dives mesh with the wintry waters. Which is to say that these four lobes cannot be duly mapped or mopped, tapped or topped, and I remain at the mercy of a fallible and fluctuating organ. In the end, none of us really know anything. And I quite like that. But there’s no harm in trying.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I am now reading more books than you would believe one man could read. And I have only myself to blame. While things have not yet escalated to the point where exercising the espresso option on my coffeemaker becomes mandatory, they are certainly getting there. And if I start to cackle wildly in the forthcoming weeks or you see some balding man attempting to scale the side of the Grand Army Plaza arch in desperation, don’t say I didn’t warn you. In the meantime…
  • Sacha Arnold considers The Three Paradoxes.
  • Of all the astute pens for hire, why the hell did Tanenhaus opt for Rex Reed? But it is good to see Good Man Park make the cut.
  • 318 different covers of War of the Worlds. (via Paul Collins)
  • Edith Wharton in Esperanto.
  • Here’s the problem with current literary journalism: “I’ve since read the book–and liked it a lot, it’s one of my favorite books of the year–and I must say I’m completely flummoxed by the apparently controversy that’s surrounded the book.” What is the point of talking with an author if one has not read the book in question? An extended conversation along these lines is useless for both author and audience if the interlocutor has not bothered to read the book in full. That Nissley remains “completely flummoxed” because he has not bothered to use his deficient noodle is not much of a surprise. Nor is it particularly earth-shattering to discover that his questions are more generic than Akiva Goldman’s best attempts at narrative. Is this cheap blanket advocacy an effort by Tom Nissley to cope for his clear shortcomings? Or could it be that the Amazon blog is about as journalistic as a golden globular quid pro quo afforded to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? Here on the Internet, we have a great medium to deflect this sort of thing. And Nissley’s blown it because he prefers being a toothless tool.
  • Sarvas on Shalom. McLemee on Mailer.
  • If all goes according to plan, I hope to make my thoughts known about Judith Freeman’s The Long Embrace in a rather unusual manner. But for the moment, check out Richard Rayner’s review in the LATBR.
  • Bob Hoover believes that “[s]uccess as a novelist is found between the pages, not the sheets.” But cannot success in the latter lead to success in the former? Or are stopperage-specific muses inherently worthless?
  • Anita Thompson ain’t a fan of the Jann Wenner HST oral history. Apparently, Wenner took her out of the book because “she has an exaggerated sense of who she was in terms of Hunter. She had another kind of role.” Which leads one to wonder what Wenner perceives that role to be. Handmaiden perhaps? (via Likely Stories)