Note: today's post was written by Steve, whose other excellent musings may be found here. Look for more regular updates from your usual suspects soon, now that summer produce season is in full swing.
As far as cooking goes, I’ve never been huge on experimenting. I always find myself following recipes rigidly, panicking if I’m even five seconds late to pull something from the oven. I haven’t the know-how to throw in a mixture of spices to create a new flavor. Probably one of the most dangerous experiments I’ve tried in the kitchen so far was leaving a cup of mushrooms out of a recipe (solely for the fact that I don’t like mushrooms). I love cooking, but I’ve never been comfortable deviating from written recipes.
This morning, I woke up and went to the kitchen to find that it had been quite some time before someone had restocked it. No cereals, an excessive amount of oatmeal, and just one egg (two if you count the one that was cracked inside the carton). Deciding I wasn’t in the mood for oatmeal, I thought I’d give the egg a shot. But I had eggs yesterday and the day before that, why should I do simple eggs again?
While searching through the nearly-empty fridge for something to do with this egg, I came across a nearly-empty bag of mozzarella cheese. I’ve thrown cheese on eggs before, usually cheddar or American, but mozzarella doesn’t taste good on an egg by itself. Then, my eyes came across a nearly-empty jar of spaghetti sauce.
Prenatal chicken parm, I thought to myself. Or would it be pre-natal? Let me tell you, it’s weird to find yourself going to Wikipedia to look up what a common egg is.
So, I threw some bread in the toaster and started to fry my egg as I usually do (over-hard). After I flipped the egg, I threw a small handful of mozzarella cheese on top and tried to spread it around as much as I could without burning myself. Then, I spooned some of the spaghetti sauce on top of that. I’m wondering if I should have done the cheese and the sauce in reverse order, since I had no way of telling when the cheese was melted underneath the sauce.
After a minute or two, I took the egg out of the pan and sandwiched it between two slices of toast (nice and brown for that crisp breading taste). I would have loved to have paired this meal with a glass of grape juice (because hey, it’s Italian), but all I had in the fridge was a nearly-empty carton of orange juice, so that had to do.
I took a bite into the sandwich, and immediately realized I had put too much sauce on the egg. Excessive sauce aside, it tasted quite good. I couldn’t taste the egg as much as the sauce and cheese (in retrospect, I essentially made a small pizza with a fried egg in it), but the overall flavor was still pretty good. Just as I expected, the cheese in the middle of the egg wasn’t quite melted, but that cold portion only lasted one bite. Maybe this dish deserves a little less disgusting name than “prenatal”, I thought.
Granted, I know this isn’t exactly Entropic Kitchen material. I’m nowhere near as dangerous with my food experimentations as Andrew, Chris, and Derek are. I guess if there’s one thing I learned from my experience, it’s that you don’t have to be Emeril Lagasse to have fun with your food. Experimenting is good every once in a while, no matter what degree you go to.
Side note from Derek: I was quite relieved to find that Prenatal Chicken Parm was not in this family of recipes.
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