Jamie Oliver once said, "If you are going to eat 3 times a day - you might as well make it worth your while..." or something to that effect.
I personally have moved from the habit part of it to the passion part. And maybe even a little to the obsessive part. My first baby steps in cooking took place around the age of 12 when I learned how to fry an egg.
I had a working mother, and living in apartheid South Africa in the late 70's meant that our family had a maid. Our maid, Evaline, was a plump African who was had been our cleaning fairy for as long as I could remember. She did the cleaning and the washing and the dusting and the ironing. She could turn the house from dirty to sparkling in a matter of minutes. If ever there was someone who was the magic cleaning fairy, it was her. She was Mrs Sparkle, she was the difinitive ad for Mrs Min...
But, alas, when it came to Evaline's cooking repertoire, it was a different matter entirely. In fact I do not think that she knew the first thing about cooking. As the saying goes -can't fry an egg!
Over the years I have learned that there is much truth in that saying. In more ways than one. Simply stated, one can judge a person's cooking abilities by how they do an egg. Whether it be poached, scrambled, easy over or boiled. Pick a method, and you should, with reasonable certainty, be able to gauge whether they know anything at all about food.
Its true. The first thing Gordon Ramsey asks his apprentice chefs to make is not Quail Eggs in Rose Petal sauce, or Creme Brulee, but rather to do Scrambled Egg.
To make truly great scrambled egg is indeed an art.
To boil an egg, is indeed also an art. It is if you want it to be perfect. Though I can make a near perfect scrambled egg, almost every time, I still cannot boil an egg perfectly, every time. Even after many years of cooking, it would still, occasionally, come out too soft.
Evaline's cooking repertoire revolved exclusively around doing eggs. And quite frankly, doing them badly. Eggs which landed in our plates were rubbery affairs which had an elastic quality similar to a small fried beach ball. No matter how she did them. It would move to a different location on the plate when making an attempt to pin it down with a fork. If it happened to be fried, the whites were bouncy and the centers cooked until there were no moisture left. Her boiled eggs were boiled in fast boiling water for a long, long time. They were very easy to peel, which was kind of unfortunate and the effect of the rapid boiling, indeed made them like little rubber balls. The outer layer of the yolk had a smudgy green black coating from excessive cooking and being dry, they were difficult to swallow, unless you washed every mouthful down with gulps of milk.
It therefore not very long before I made my first attempt at frying an egg. And, with that simple, necessary act of learning to fry an egg my love for cooking started. It would take years and years to perfect them, but the love for cooking, was immediate. Soon fried eggs turned to scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled eggs, omelets, and later scrumptious italian fritates.
This is how my love for cooking was born, all thanks to Evaline and her grumpy, rubbery eggs!
