Murphy's Kitchen

As both my readers are aware, I am not much of a cook, so much ...ehrm... not, that I occasionally blog about my kitchen exploits here, failures as well as successes.

Due to my wacky schedule, I haven't cooked breakfast at home for quite a while. I had the same bacon sitting in my refrigerator for at least two months and, gastrically daring as I am, even that seemed too dangerous today as I contemplated my options.

After my overnight shift in the taxi, I made a morning stop to stock up on a few grocery items. In a purely impulse shopping moment, my eyes alighted on a package of "breakfast links" in the cooler beside the butcher's counter...little sausages made (I believe) right on the premises at my local mom & pop (chain) store. "Hmmm," I thought. "A nice alternative to bacon," I thought. I also had some eggs that were getting old; the sell-by date on the carton is April 15. So I bought a dozen fresh.

Once home I threw away the old bacon. I opened the old carton of eggs only to reveal that it was an entire dozen. In the interest of not wasting an entire dozen eggs, I'm just daring enough to eat those. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. What does kill me... well....

I got things going on the stove. I even opted to brew up a "pot" of French press coffee, rare for me since I gave up caffeine (again) a few weeks ago. I simmered up four breakfast links over a low-to-medium flame while the water heated up for the coffee and while I prepared the toast and cracked open the eggs (which looked and smelled just fine, by the way) and deposited them in a Pyrex measuring cup/bowl/glass-thing-with-a-handy-handle-and-pour-spout.

As the links heated up, the oils inside them began to bubble, and I noticed that the skin of one of them had expanded balloon-like, and I could actually see the oil pooling inside and boiling! No sooner had I noticed this, and thought to myself, "If that bubble bursts, oil is going to squirt out," the bubble burst and oil squirted out. And of all directions the oil could have squirted out, guess which direction it squirted...

Yes. Right. At. Me. It doused my shirt right at belly level, and now I look like some sort of greasy hillbilly with a greasy hillbilly belly. No offense to any greasy hillbillies among my readers, but I know both of you, and neither of you is a hillbilly. Well, not a greasy one, anyway....

I saw another of the links bubbling up the same way, so I rolled the bubble side to face away from me and watched it burst and douse the other sausages. Suckers!
Toast was done and buttered, I was sipping the first of the first coffee I had made at home in about two months, and the links were all but finished cooking — and squirting. It was now time for the eggs.

In the past I have waxed poetic about my attempts at The Flip, but it has become somewhat of an obsession with me to perfect the eggs-over flip without breaking the yolks, or dropping the whole heap on the floor, or the stove, or the sink...or the ceiling. Since it had been several months since I had cooked anything, I was feeling pretty rusty about the flip, which I haven't even gotten good at, yet, in the first place, even.

I poured the eggs into the pan of bubbling butter, and both the yolks slid toward one side of the pan, huddling together and elongating slightly, appearing almost as apprehensive eyes looking fearfully at me. Hey, I worked all night. I'm tired. I see what I see.

So, with sausagey hillbilly grease-stains on my shirt, I gripped the pan handle tightly, walked the bubbling, fearfully quivering eggs over to the sink, and prepared for the flip. The eggs slid easily back and forth around in the pan, looking at me now in sheer horror. And -FLIP- ...and the whole shebang went only half-way over, perpendicular to the world, and plopped into the pan, edge first, both yolks breaking as they plopped back into the butter.

DAMN.

The only thing worse would be if the damned aged things kill me after I ate them.

I seem to be fine so far.



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