Lesson 6: Green Eggs and Ham

We rounded out last week with sauce mania: beurre blanc, béarnaise sauce, mayonnaise (perfect for this Utah delicacy, which they call salsa de golf here), tarter sauce and various vinaigrettes. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but suffice it to say it was a fat overload just before the beach. And today, we made chicken, fish and beef stock- a good basic to know but pretty boring.


Tragically, brunch doesn't really exist in Buenos Aires. Poor things, deprived of God's perfect meal.  On Tuesday, our Argentine classmates got a taste of American diner heaven with...eggs galore!


Fried eggs: in order to prevent those pesky bubbles and charred bottoms, we poured about two inches of mixed (olive/vegetable, but you can use whatever) oil into a frying pan and cracked an egg into it. You would think this would be obscenely unhealthy, but they told us the egg is actually less absorbent when it's submerged in sizzling hot oil. Believe that if you want to, but the technique definitely makes pristine fried eggs (like the one below except without a broken yolk, whoopsies!).

This may be my new favorite food: scrambled eggs with ham, parsley and shoe string french fries. Absolutely amazing.

A tip re: scrambled eggs- you have to get the pan very, very hot, drop in your already muddled-up eggs and then RAPIDLY scramble them around with a wooden spoon. This keeps them from burning and produces creamy, non-watery perfection.

A sampling of our other egg dishes: 

poached egg- boil water and add a dash of white wine vinegar; use a whisk to stir the water and create a vortex; once the water slows down (a lot), carefully slide in the egg and MAGICALLY, the white swirls around and you get a cute, neat package around the creamy yolk.

tortilla española- one of my favorite meals of all time (which I discovered at Spain's equivalent of Subway) is slices of tortilla española with a little mayo on a baguette; we made this by adding sautéed onions and thin, round, briefly deep-fried slices of potato to scrambled eggs, pouring this mixture into a frying pan, and masterfully flipping it (using a pot lid!) once it had set to brown both sides.

omelette- the omelettes they had us make are very different from the pancake-style we're used to in the U.S.; to make them, we briefly scrambled the eggs and then crowded them over to one side of the pan; once one side had cooked, we half-flipped, half-rolled it to brown the other.

Our egg extravaganza was the perfect cure for brunch-sickness and might even make Dr. Seuss proud.