On Cooking: Scrambled Egg with Garlic, Onion and Tomato

It's not an omelette. Because omelettes look pretty and clean, and this is neither.

Image courtesy of rakratchada torsap at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

This is probably the first dish, shall we say, I had exercised any creativity on after I'd gotten the hang of cooking sunny side ups. Wanting more variety in my cooking arsenal, I scavenged around the house one day and found what would become something like my Golden Trio: garlic, onion and tomato. Back then I had even less of an idea what ingredients went together (seriously, how do you know this stuff?). Back then -- as I do now -- I went with Don't Like Don't Touch. Example: rice and ice cream, which I think I heard once my cousin actually eats. But everybody's seen garlic and onion on tomato-based pasta. How, then, can it go wrong?


INGREDIENTS:

I'll now shut up about posting (again!) crap pictures.

This is basically throwing things together into a frying pan, which works well -- perhaps better than French toast and everything that calls for measuring ingredients -- with the Cooking Methods > Recipes dictum adopted by Chef Todd Mohr and G. Stephen Jones of The Reluctant Gourmet. It goes like this: want more of something? Go ahead. Don't want ingredient A, want to replace Ingredient A with Ingredient B, or want to add Ingredient B though it's not in the recipe, if there even is one? What's stopping you?

In fact, the number of garlic cloves I use varies, and I'd fixed on my regular of two tomatoes, two eggs, and one onion only because 1) cooking with one egg wasn't enough to coat much of the Golden Trio; 2) I like tomato; and 3) I hate chopping onions.

I decided to add cheese this time, because cheese = good.


THIS IS, BY THE WAY, A GOOD EXERCISE FOR KNIFE SKILLS.

Reluctant Gourmet here has a great page on cutting.

Now, I confess knife skills hadn't been a priority until now. Who cares, right? What matters is cooking the food, never mind if your veg doesn't look pretty.

But there's more to handling knives that knowing knife blade + downward motion towards food = cut. They're called knife SKILLS for a reason. One of the best ways to avoid accidents (and I'm lucky I haven't had any so far) is to take tips from the pros.

I tried dicing, and I tell you, it is hard, cutting little cloves of garlic and a teeny tiny onion.

No pictures here. I don't know how other cooking blogs do it. Do they have someone else holding the camera while they cook? How do you take pictures while prepping or cooking without dousing your electronics with food juice, or going back and forth between stove/prep table and sink without burning the food?

I found this tip from Chef Todd Mohr on tomatoes, too. See, back then I cut up the tomatoes without removing the juice and seeds, which resulted in the plate I'd put the chopped ingredients into swimming in the stuff.


THE HOW:

Yes, it's actually as simple as I'd said. Cut everything up, beat the eggs, and grate how much cheese you want in it.

I fry in the ff order: garlic, onion, tomato. I normally wait until the garlic has browned and the onions' coloring faded before I add the tomatoes (fruit, juice, seeds), but I was hungry this time, and barely waited after tossing the first two before I added the tomatoes and egg.

Sprinkle in salt if you want, by the way; I didn't, since I'm one of the weirdos who don't like salt on my egg.

Mix everything around until it becomes one nice, mixed mess. Pour into plate.

VERDICT:

Bland this time, because the garlic wasn't toasted, there were no tomato seeds to toast, and the egg didn't cook in the tomato juice.

Maybe. It's been a while since I'd cooked this, and I might have remembered things differently.