Read Online Man With a Pan by John Donahue - Free Book Online

declined. There was a time when my major contributions in the kitchen were making break-fast for the kids and washing dishes. I do more of the cooking now because, left to her own devices, my wife is apt to eat little but cold cereal or sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and a little olive oil.
    Other than baking bread, which used to fulfill me (a thing I rarely do since a Cuisinart bread machine came into our lives), I have never cared much for cooking, and like my mother before me—a good provider and a wonderful person, but not much of a chef—my weapon of choice is the frying pan. Susan Straub, wife of my sometime collaborator Peter Straub, once said, “Give Steve a frypan and a hunk of butter, and he can cook anything.” It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one. I like to broil whitefish in the oven, and I’ve discovered a wonderful gadget called the George Foreman grill (cleaning it, however, is a pain in the ass), but for the most part I enjoy frying. You can call it sautéing if it makes you feel better—but it’s really just educated frying.
    Turning down the heat is always a wonderful idea, I think. Whether I’m frying hamburgers, making breakfast omelets, or doing pancakes for a pickup supper, the best rule is to be gentle. Frying gets a bad name because people get enthusiastic and fry the shit out of stuff. The grease splatters; the smoke billows; the smoke detectors go off. No, no, no. Show a little patience. Engage in culinary foreplay.
    If you feel the urge to turn a stove-top burner any higher than a little past med, suppress it. You are better served by getting your stuff out of the fridge—your pork chops, your lamb chops, even your chicken, if you’re frying that—and letting it warm up to something approximating room temperature. I’m not talking leaving it out until it rots and draws flies, but if a steak sits on the counter for twenty minutes or so before cooking, it’s not going to give you the belly gripes unless it was spunky to begin with. If you start frying something fresh out of the fridge, it’s maybe thirty-seven degrees. It’s going to cool off your pan before you even start to cook. Why would you do that?
    Be gentle is the rule I try to follow. I can respect the food even if I’m not especially crazy about cooking it (mostly because I can never find the right goddamn pan or pot, and even if I can find the pot, I can’t find the goddamn cover, and where the hell did those olives go—they were right on the bottom shelf in a Tupperware, goddamn it).
    Want to make a really good omelet? Heat a tablespoon of butter in your frypan (on a burner that’s turned a little past med). Wait until the butter melts and starts to bubble just a little. Then go on and sauté your mushrooms, onions, green peppers, or whatever. All this time, you’ve got let’s say five eggs all cracked and floating in a bowl. Put in three tablespoons of milk (if your mother told you one tablespoon for every egg, she was wrong, especially when it comes to omelets) and then beat it like crazy. Get some air in that honey. Let it sit for a while, then beat it some more. When that’s done, you can go on and pour it in with your sautéed stuff. Stir it all around a little bit, then let it sit. When the eggs start to get a little bit solid around the edges, lift an edge with your spatch and tip the frypan so the liquid egg runs underneath. Wait until the eggs start to show a few blisterlike bubbles. Add some grated cheese if you want. Then use your spatula to fold over the most solid part of the omelet. If you want to flip it, you’re either an acrobat or an idiot.

    All on MED heat, plus a little more. The omelet is happy, not even brown on the bottom, let alone charred. A five-egg omelet will serve two hungry people, three “I just want to nibble” people, or ten super-models. And the principle of gentle cooking holds for everything you do on the stove top. If your definition of sautéing is “gentle cooking,”