My boyfriend, John, is always looking to me for cooking help. He knows a good amount but he assumes I know more, which I am very realistically modest about. I know what I know and I do have some sort of instinct for eyeballing measurements and the basic techniques needed for baking, because that is my specialty. I am definitely NOT an expert chef. I have a limited menu that I cook on rotation that I enjoy. The great thing about John is that he was very eager to learn and even jumps at the opportunity to chop onions for example. I wish I knew more about cooking so that I could be a better teacher but what ends up happening is what happened today on our leisurely Sunday morning, we decided to make omelets. This is what we did:
How To Not Make an Omelet:
Ingredients:
- 1 dozen eggs
- Shredded cheese
- Olive oil
- milk
- Spray butter
- 1 green pepper
- 1 red pepper
- 1 yellow pepper
- 1 orange pepper
- 1 onion
- 1 small tomato
- 4 small Portobello mushrooms
- some spinach
- 1 avocado
The Process
We chopped and diced the peppers, onion, and tomato. We ended up only using about ¼ of each pepper. We put a small pan on the stove at a high heat and poured some olive oil on it as it warmed. We occasionally stirred it as it cooked.
We put 12 eggs in a bowl with some milk and mixed it up to a good consistency. We put a larger pan on the stove and greased the pan with some spray butter we found in my refrigerator that my mom must have bought. Now we were ready for the magic.
We poured half of our eggs in the larger pan so that it covered the whole circular area. We then threw a bunch of shredded cheese on the whole thing. We grabbed a handful of spinach and put it on half of the omelet. More cheese then we put our cooked peppers, onions and tomatoes on it. We sliced our avocado in half and put some slices on it. Again all this is only on half of the surface. We eyeballed to see if the eggs we cooked. Then, the side without the veggies on it, we scrapped and folded itself onto the other side of our omelet. And there you have it…
As you can see, it’s way too stuffed. We decided for our second omelet we would roughly do the same thing just with less veggies on the inside. It was better…
I should mention that I’ve never made an omelet before. I’ve watched other people do it and just kind of faked my way through this whole experience, relying on common sense and intuition. Ultimately we concluded we used too many eggs and too many vegetables. However the whole thing was delicious but we both couldn’t finish our monster omelets. Success, we were full and satisfied with our meal.
After we cleaned the kitchen in my apartment we headed to John’s house to start a garden in the backyard. This is another situation where I might have a little more experience than John. John’s old roommate, Clifford, use to have a large vegetable garden, a small herb garden and an organic compost pile in their backyard. However Clifford moved out and his garden died and over grew. John really wanted to start fresh and get in the habit of growing some of his own food. Once we walked out into the backyard we realized we probably won’t get to gardening today. Today we were going to be clearing out the weeds and mowing the grass. Thankfully it wasn’t grossly hot and it was mostly cloudy day. I found some gloves and begun to clear out some weeds in the small garden by hand while John searched for a lawn mowed then wrestled with figuring out how to work the weed whacker. I found the place Clifford had his old compost pile and straighten up the edging. I got tired fast and it felt like we weren’t accomplishing anything.
I went over to help with the weed whacker situation. He was having trouble finding a long enough extension cord. Together we covered more ground and took care of the problem. (Go Team John and Sarah!) Well we just gave up on getting the weed whacker to reach the back garden. (yay?) We took turns using it around the patio, touching up the small garden and fence edge and clearing a path to get to the recycling and garbage cans. (Go Team Go!) I also started straightening up the patio. It was getting late in the afternoon and we wore the weed whacker wire down to nothing. We figured we needed to make a trip to Home Depot for more supplies. We showed up to the complex only to realize how utterly dehydrated we both were. We called it a day and took a nap.
Now that we have a better idea of what we’re up against, we will be much more prepared for the backyard next weekend.
