on cooking (or, a breakfast blog post)

I like to cook, but I don't do it much. Most of my cooking winds up being with roozle, or at least in her kitchen. (This is not to say I do my share of the cooking there either.) When I do cook, it's generally improvisational; I find an ingredient or two, figure out what I want to make with it, and then find other ingredients and spices to go with that. I'm not the world's most efficient prep chef but once I get started cooking, cooking is what I'm doing and I tend to plow forward, creating at least the illusion of speed.

I mentioned this to miss_chance this morning and she suggested I make breakfast (usually she does this). I found some sausage and carrots in the fridge, decided that slices of sausage and shredded carrots would make a good omelette, and lined up some other things I thought would be tasty in that. But we were out of eggs and I didn't feel like going out for some. So I made this:

Zero-egg Omelette

on an oiled omelette pan:
two chicken sausages, quartered lengthwise and cubed (instead of sliced)
half a red pepper, diced
two or three carrots saved from the bottom of a chicken roasting pan, sliced thick (instead of shredded fresh carrots)

once the pan was up to temperature:
the tails of a quarter-pound of asparagus, chopped, added in stages according to how far from the heads they came from
a couple of shiitake mushrooms, chopped fine

at the last minute:
the heads of the asparagus, left intact
the last of a bottle of tarragon
2-3 oz of spinach

I forgot that we had anadama bread in the freezer, or I would have gotten the toast going before miss_chance came downstairs. But even though the toast was late, the strong chicken flavors and the hint of tarragon made it go on toast just as an omelette would have. And the softness of the mushrooms and the previously-cooked carrots made the texture just right.

I don't use much tarragon at home, but I use it a lot at roozle's. Maybe I should get some for here, and some of the other spices I've grown fond of.