I’m in an egg coma. I have never worked with so many eggs in my entire life. As a class, we must have gone through 20 dozen eggs and I’m probably underestimating. Egg day was today and eggs were pretty much the only ingredient we used. You are probably wondering how did they spend the entire day only working on egg dishes. Well, I’m about to blow your mind. We made “French” scrambled eggs with and without cream, flat omelet, round omelet, stuffed omelet with sautéed onions/ peppers/tomatoes, “french” styled deviled eggs with a béchamel crème sauce (stuffed eggs, chimay style), poached eggs, fried eggs, and baked eggs with cream. Not going to lie I straight up tore the omelet game up. If Lebron James is the king on the b-ball court, then I’m the queen of the level 2 omelets (ok.. maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself… I’m just so PROUD I flipped the omelet over and it landed in the pan! BAMN! It’s the little things in life people!).
I’m kind of re-nauseous after just listing every egg dish we did- thinking of all the runny yolks. I am NOT a yolk person and never was. Nothing really repulses me more (besides dirty toenails) then runny egg yolks. Not even dipping bread into it sounds appealing to me. The first thing we learned was how to make poached eggs. The key is to add vinegar into the pot before you break the egg in order to hold the yolk and white together. Drop the egg into the hot simmering water (close to the water- not from a far like my partner Josephine who got angry at the egg and slammed it into the pot like a WWF wrestler- the egg went everywhere mind you) and quickly stir the water, so that the egg doesn’t drop to the bottom. Instantly, you will see the egg beginning to poach. You take it out once the egg feels like a chicken cutlet/ fake silicon boob. Me to runny eggs is like my mom to nutmeg (we are (cough-cough) “allergic” to them). Once we broke the poached egg, the yolk came flowing out like when you’ve been holding your pee in for a very, very, very long time. I always try everything, so I just took a little small bite.
We then learned how to scramble eggs the French way. Add cream to your scramble eggs (a little) to make them more tender and creamy. It was heavenly, but the French eat their scrambled eggs wet and Lashandra and I were not having that. After Lashandra cooked her eggs a la French style, she then recooked them a la Lashandra style (that’s mah gurl). Xandra even brought her own mini- tobacco sauce jar. Don’t ask her for some though, she was really grumpy and didn’t share. Carlos must have not heard the “no sharing” because he stole a few drops on his eggs. I told Xandra I’d bring her another $2 bottle tomorrow if she let me share and she still was moaning/groaning “the whole class aint using my gosh darn hot sauce”. She came up to me later on and apologized for being so sassy and granted me permission to use some (I didn’t though- if it was Franks Hot sauce on the other hand… oh lordy! that bottle would have been empty and all over my eggs).
We then made two different styles of omelets- flat and round. The round are much harder to make and you want to have No color on them. The inside of the round omelet should be gooie like the scrambled eggs. The flat omelet we made with all the sautéed vegetables, which was delicious. The flat omelet is the one where I flipped into the air and it landed back perfectly into my pan (Iron chef in the making). My partner Josephine - who has really warmed up to me in level 2 than level 1 and embraced my “El-isms”- asked me to be my partner this morning, I was a little shocked. We worked well together even though she was super hungover. Josephine’s egg ended up half in the pan and half on the floor when she attempted to flip it. I was laughing so hard you could probably hear me from down the hall, not that you don’t normally. Prince William and Prince Kate think Baby George has a set of lungs on him, wait till they hear my pipes!
From the omelets we moved onto the baked eggs in a little ceramic soufflé bowl. We buttered up the bowl cracked an egg into it and then put our reduced cream sauce over it to bake in the oven. We overcooked our eggs because the egg yolk inside was supposed to be runny and ours was fully cooked (oops… not sure if it was on purpose or by accident). After the baked eggs, we made our “french deviled eggs”. We filled the eggs with a mushroom duxelle (sautéed shallots/ sautéed mushrooms/garlic/lemon/salt/pepper), cooked egg yolk, some béchamel sauce with grated gruyere cheese on top, and then baked it in the oven. After we transferred the eggs under the salamander to get some color on top. I took a bite even though, I’m not the biggest deviled eggs fan (pic 1- omelet, pic 2- “deviled eggs”)
All and all, today was a lot of fun. Sagot at the end of class asked Chef what kind of questions he should ask this professional chef when he meets him. I took over the conversation by suggesting various conversation starters such as “What is your favorite food to make Chef?”, “Where have you worked before?”, “What did you do right after cooking school?”, “Do you have children?” etc.. Everybody was laughing and told Sagot he should just bring me along with him to ask all the questions because that’s my strong suit (sorry I was a communications/ broadcast journalism major/ yenta/ jewish grandma in the making… it comes with the territory). Chef Dominique said “it never would never be boring if you brought Eliana”. Omg Chef Dom- are you trying to bring me to tears? That was the nicest thing I’ve heard all day. I’d gladly be your permanent entertainment. Well, Sagot said he isn’t bringing me because I would steal the show and he wouldn’t get a word in with the chef. Little does Sagot know I’m NOT trying out to be a chef boo- you go right ahead and become the executive chef. At the end, Chef did a demo on how to make a fried egg and apparently it is not that easy, but chef did it on his first try. He was so pleased with himself that I started chanting “go chef, it’s your birthday” like 5 times until the whole class joined in and we were all singing “go chef, it’s your birthday”. Jack is probably my number one fan in the class because he always quickly catches on to my jokes and laughs hysterically for a good 5 minutes after alone… with me.
Fuller babe- feliz cumpleanos!
Like Chef Dom always says “Old School is good schools!”… keep on, keepin’ on.
Eliana