An Egg Metaphor (No. Not That One)

First--for those of you wondering how my 18 for 2018 is going--Well.

Blogging weekly is the first item on the list.  And yet.  

I have one blog post from January and this one for February.  Perhaps I should edit "weekly" to "monthly."

Anyhow--back to the post at hand:
If you were a child of the 80s, this is definitely stored somewhere in your long-term memory.

This is not the egg metaphor to which I am referring.

 I am not a cook.  And I'm not a foodie.  But I know enough cooks and foodies to have some good tools, some great recipes, and enough information to be dangerous.  And Better Half and I are on the tail-end of another Whole30, so there's been a lot of cooking in my house-- at least more than normal.

Breakfast for the past 30 days has been a LOT of eggs and Whole30 compliant bacon.  And because I have "good" tools in my kitchen, I've turned up my nose at the non-stick number from Target lurking in my cabinet and have been determined instead to master the art of frying eggs in a stainless steel skillet.

For me, the success of it seems to be the perfect cocktail of a properly prepped pan surface, the temperature of the pan, and the temperature of the fat used, and that perfect amount of cooking time.

I nail it a couple of times a week.  Eggs slide out of the skillet like the thing has an invisible Teflon coating.  It's easy.  I feel like I could be on a cooking show.

The rest of the time, not so much.  Either my pan was too hot/not hot enough, my fat was not cold enough, I got distracted and forgot the eggs were cooking,  I got impatient and tried to turn them too early, ad nauseum.  It can quickly become (no pun intended) a hot mess!

Good thing all is not completely lost when this happens, or eggs would quickly cease to be a cheap protein source in our home.

Usually, with a lot of patience and a fantastic stainless steel spatula, the eggs can be removed from the pan without mutilation and only they and I know the challenge involved in getting them plated.

Yesterday was one of those days.  As I was gently and carefully using my spatula to remove our breakfast from its stronghold in the pan, I thought about the 26 humans who share my first grade classroom with me every school day.

It's the same for them.  For all of us, really.   Some days, we arrive with perfectly prepped pans, perfect temperatures, and just the right amount of fat and cooking time.  We slide through the school day with ease and I should have a teaching blog!  :)  Those days are a beautiful gift.

Other days, their pans are too hot or too cold.  Cook time is off; ratios are off.  I'm off.  On those days, if I'm not careful, they're in danger of being over-cooked or worse: their delicate yolks are in danger of being damaged and spilling out everywhere.

And that's when it's time for a whole lot of patience,  a whole lot of precision, and the really good tools.  :)

And when, at the end the day, we've been successfully salvaged from calamity, that's a beautiful gift, too.