Sim-O

Mrs -O and I have been out for meal tonight. All I can say is, disappointed. In a ‘now what?’ kinda way.

Recently we’ve been to some restaurants in town and been let down with the quality of the food and/or service.
There’s the Italian place that was a bit hit and miss, but generally hit, but then started missing a bit too often. The familiar, kid friendly you-know-what-you’re-getting Pizza Express that suddenly decided their pizzas were too good and didn’t want to put the competition out of business and the Chinese that had a reputation like no other that could do with it being warmed in one of it’s microwaves. The rest, aren’t worth mentioning, apart from one, I am told, that we haven’t visited because once you’ve had the only vegetarian starter of mushrooms, you don’t really want mushrooms again for your main course*.

Where we went tonight is a little the pricey side, but then when the food is good you don’t mind paying. But it wasn’t. It was mediocre. We are also running out of decent places to eat out, too. As far as we see it, there’s a curry house and a Thai restaurant.

The only upside was, they forgot to put £15 worth of drinks on the bill. Oh and the pudding weren’t too bad either, if a little sweet…

*Thinking about it now, that was a while ago and I’ve just looked at their new menu, which we might have to give a go. There is still surprisingly little choice for vegetarians.

I cannot cook. Or at least that is the conventional wisdom so far.
Slowly, a little reluctantly, that is changing.

I can do bacon & eggs and beans on toast, they’re easy, but in the last couple of weeks have learnt how to make a risotto. That is about it. The sum total of my culinary skills.

Until tonight. Tonight omelette joined that very short list. And bloody good it was too.

Here is my recipe for beef and cheese omelette with waffles and peas…

The ingredients:
Eggs…
I wanted to make a mushroom omelette but didn’t have any mushroom, so then I thought I’d throw some hame in it. But I didn’t have any of that either so had to make do with some Tesco sandwich beef. Here, shredded ready to go in along with some grated cheese…
potato waffles…
and the peas…

The method:
First of all, Tim Almond suggested separating the yokes and the whites and doing a ‘souffle’ omelette. So I got the waffles going under the grill and separated the eggs. Piece of cake so far. See? …

As the waffles were going nicely I (intended) to whisk the egg whites until it formed foam peaks. I got a bit bored with the whisking and the waffles were doing a little quicker than expected so I gave up on that and chucked in some salt and pepper. Salt seems to go into everything and I dunno if it actually does anything so you may leave it out.

Here a picture of my (not very) foamy peaks…
It’d probably look better if I’d carried on a bit longer, but as I say, I the waffles were nearly done and my arm ached.

Around about this time I’d got me peas going.
I was canny and had prepared them earlier by pouring them into a cup covering them with water and then placed them in the microwave ready to be nuked. And I nuked ’em.

Here, I was going to take a picture of the big blob of margerine (margerine is underated. And I didn’t have any butter) but I dropped the camera right into the hot frying pan, which then bounced up, knocking the pan off the burner letting the camera land right on the gentle inferno of burning gas.

Once the camera was rescued, with no loss of life or injury I’m happy to report, I dropped the butter marg into the frying pan.
I think I may have had the pan a little too hot as it melted really quick and gave me no chance to fold the egg yolk in to my foamy egg whites before burning to the bottom of the frying pan.

I knew I was half way there. My waffles were nearly done on the second side, the peas were spinning gayely on their merry-go-round as the egg went into the pan. Hurriedly I dropped the beef (it says so on the packet so I am allowed to call it that) on to the omelette which was already starting to solidify.
Mmm. Nice…

It all started to pick up pace now as the waffles started to burn. The microwave dinged a ‘ding’ that gave no clue as to the flood of biblical proportions that had occurred inside. I don’t know how long they had been cooking, but I presumed they were done.
All I could concentrate on was not letting the omelette burn to the insanely-hotter-than-need-be frying pan as I eased the edges away with my trusty wooden spatula thing. At this point my heart started to sink as it looked like I would be having only waffles and peas for tea. The underbelly of the thing wasn’t looking too healthy.

But I pressed ahead. I sprinkled the cheese over the omelette trying to get a nice even coverage.
At this point, the waffles were done. Just right. So out of the grill and on to the plate they went and into the grill on full whack went the yellow lump of goo.

With my waffles going cold on the plate and the omelette finishing in the grill, the peas got drained. Fortunately I started with a large amount so I was comfortable about losing a few of the little fellas down the sink.

I then checked on the omelette. It was done! At last. I tilted the pan and delicately slide the omelette half on to the plate and then folded the second half over. It smelt pretty good.

I then finished dressing the plate.

Ta-Da!!…

The end result:
It looked a little, well, you can see for yourself what it looked like. Not too appealing for some reason. But it tasted beautiful. With a lovely texture too. The strips of beef were a waste of time, didn’t even know they were there. Maybe some bits of steak next time.

On the whole, not a bad first effort. Apart from the cold waffles.

Thanx to Tim, BigDaddyMerk and Hackneye for the tips and Mrs -O for putting me in a position of necessarty.