Souffléed Omelet with Herbs

Recipe: Souffléed Omelet with Herbs

Not sure how well known a fact this is about me, but I started an adventure in becoming a wine connoisseur last year. There is a wine shop in Vienna that has wine sampling every other Wednesday. When I started, I could only handle the really sweet stuff and definitely no red wine. Over the past year though, I’ve actually developed my palette to the point I enjoy slightly drier wines like Chardonnay and I have even had a few red wines in my fridge. There are 2 things I’ve learned about myself and wine though…not a good idea to drink wine on a slightly empty stomach if I need to cook later that night. And sometimes if I’m feeling down, not a good idea for me to drink wine, it tends to exacerbate my mood and make it worse. Somehow, I managed to break both rules in the same night. Let me first say that by the end of work today, I found myself feeling depressed and down. Why you ask? Beats me. My mood nowadays seems to fluctuate for something as simple as driving across the 5^th Street bridge. I’ve cried this river to most of you enough that I won’t repeat the song now. It’s enough to say I just wasn’t feeling very good about myself when I left work today. I will say, when I left work I was looking forward to cooking. Key word being was. I stopped by the wine shop to pick up my Wine Club selection, and had a drink even though I told myself it wouldn’t be a good idea. And somewhere in the midst of sipping my first and second sampling of wine, I lost my mojo for even cooking. I’m sure the wine on an empty stomach didn’t help. After I left the wine shop, I went home, curled up on the couch and kept the buzzed pity party going. But, one of the reasons I started this cooking adventure was to give me a positive outlet and something I can really connect with. I’m not fond of most things with my life right now. But as unhappy as I am with most things in my life, I do realize deep down that feeling sorry for myself will not bring me the things I most want in my life. And as great and supportive as my friends are, and as much as they have all helped me, it’s up to me to find a way to deal with and find a way to overcome the hills and valleys of my life. So, after about 10 minutes in the fetal position, I got up, put on some inspirational music, put on my pj’s and got to work in the kitchen. And there you have it, midlife crisis #82 of 2010 averted.

Now that I’ve shown how emotionally unstable I truly am, I should probably talk about my cooking adventure today. The main star of this recipe is the fresh herbs. I’ve talked about how much I love the taste of fresh herbs. It’s something I discovered in my first recipe, the Linguine with Lobster Tarragon sauce. I sincerely may never use dried herbs again. Fresh herbs just accentuate the taste of the food more than I’ve ever experienced with dried herbs. I particularly love Tarragon, to me it has a minty like taste to it. But as much as I love the taste of cooking with fresh herbs, I think I equally do not love chopping them up. Maybe it’s because I’m just a rookie at this, but it seems to take me FOR-EV-ER to snip, mince, or chop any fresh herbs I’ve used. I started cooking at 7 tonight and didn’t actually mix anything up until at least 7:45 because I was rinsing and very meticulously chopping rosemary, tarragon, parsley, and chives. I’m still not convinced I’m not the world’s slowest cook. Once I got started though, things went pretty quickly. Now here’s a math question for you: how many eggs does it take to make a 4 egg omelet? 4 eggs you say? Of course not silly. It takes 8! I believe this is where my first rule of not drinking on an empty stomach would’ve been nice to follow. J I had to separate the egg white and yolk and even though I’ve done this many, many times I seemed to not be able to do it for the life of me tonight. The first egg actually went okay. The second egg had a little of the yolk fall into my egg whites. The third egg yolk just completely fell into the egg whites and pretty much ruined the first eggs I’d done to that point. I figured it would be best to stop the bleeding and figure out how to fix my technique before I ruined an entire carton of eggs. I screwed up 1 more egg before I got it down finally. Again, I’d never messed up separating an egg before. Stupid wine. This recipe is actually a hybrid of an omelet and a soufflé. I beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and water until there were stiff peaks. In a separate bowl, I mixed the herbs, egg yolks, parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper and folded the egg yolk mixture into the egg whites. Next I poured my mixture into a frying pan on top of the stove to cook the egg until it started to puff. This took about 5 minutes. I then placed the pan into the oven and let the omelet firm for another 7 minutes. And viola! My Souffléed Omelet was complete. It tasted really good. I do think it fell a little, as it wasn’t as puffy as the cookbook picture looks. But all the same, I still think my masterpiece is BEA-UTI-FUL! J