We Have A Winner! (Omelette Pan Edition)

As usual, your comments were wonderful.

Omelette memories appear, for the most part, to be fond ones. Whether made on honeymoon for Barbara: for a husband by rb and Lori; by a husband for Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella, suburban prep, Class factotum and Queen of Cashmere; by a boyfriend for Victoria; by mom for Staircase Witch, Jennifer, Belle on Heels, JAW, minerrva, and lisa; by someone else's French mom for Booklady; as a mom by Town and Country Mom; by dad for Maggie, Anne, and palais; by a beloved teacher for cdclaycomb; for oneself as did Alice and Faux Fuchsia; at a college diner for Austyn or a grandmother's country club by Blue12rain; or, inspired by Julia Child for MJ, see you there!, and Sharpiegirl. The most original, however, was either Deja Pseu, who learned from a classic car garage mechanic (reminds me of this classic Springsteen video), or Betty B48 who are her first omelette at the Parliamentary Restaurant at the Canadian House Of Parliament. On fire indeed.

Jean S. simply had her first one, "back before dirt."

And for Academic, Hopeful, here's to dignity. No need to repeat why.

Favorite omelette ingredients include: for Laura, thinly sliced ham, roasted red peppers, goat cheese and maybe asparagus; for Karena, mushrooms, asparagus, and mild cheddar; for glaciercountyhoney, apple, cheddar, and nutmeg; for Len♥reNeverM♥re, anything with butter and cheese; for Patsy, cream cheese before goat cheese was invented; for jinnan-tonnyx (I only JUST figured out what her name means) whatever leftovers she has; for Pixie, Abigail and Ms. Givens, mushrooms; for Tabitha, truffles if not for youth; for Victoria, fresh asparagus, feta, mushrooms and a few scallions; for Plumberry, bacon and leeks; for High Heeled Life, spinach; for Walking Barefoot, herbs; for Red, French feta, any fresh herbs she has on hand, and a few cherry tomatoes; for Sheri, red peppers, cheese and mushrooms; for VictoriaN, ham and mushroom; for hostess of the humble bungalow, fresh caught crab and freshly snipped chives; for mint juleps and magnolias, peccorino romano and scallion frittata covered in an ahi tuna mint and tomato mixture. Mint Julep is, clearly, a very serious cook. For CaraBella, tuna, breadcrumbs, onions and egg. Her parents were, clearly, very original cooks.

We even received two more omelette recipes, to add to mine, and Jan's souffle. The first, from Russian Chic, who says,

"I would like to share my grandmother’s omelette recipe.
Since it is little rich and starchy, it is better reserved for a weekend brunch.

Ingredients
8 strips strips bacon, cut into paperclip-sized pieces
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic clove, chopped
Dash of balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon oil or duck or pork fat, more if needed
3 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
5 eggs
Salt and pepper

Directions
1. Fry the bacon in a small frying pan until crisp and remove to paper towel to drain. Pour off all but a tablespoon of the bacon fat from the pan. Add the butter to the pan, heat to medium and gently fry the onion until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook one minute. Remove all to a plate. Deglaze the pan with a splash of vinegar and reduce until it’s almost gone.
2. Add the tablespoon of oil or fat and get the pan quite hot this time. Saute the potatoes, stirring only occasionally, until they are soft when pierced with a fork and very crisp and golden on the outside, a good 20 minutes. Return the onion, garlic, and bacon to the pan.
Gently stir the eggs with a fork, season with salt and pepper, and pour them over the potatoes. Cook until the eggs are set on the bottom, but still a bit slithery on top. Cover the omelette and continue cooking until the top sets, no more than a minute because you still want it a little runny on top. Run a spatula around the edge and slip the omelette out onto a large plate."

The second from Elke.

"The first omelette I ever made for my husband was the morning after our first sleep over. 18 years later -- he still asks for it every Sunday.

2 T butter
6 eggs
1/2 c chopped ham
1/2 c chopped salami
1/2 c shredded cheddar
1/4 green pepper
1/4 red pepper
2 T cream cheese
1 t parsley
salt
pepper
Salsa

Melt butter until it stops bubbling. While butter melts, separate eggs, whip whites and yolks separately, then combine. Add to pan. Reduce heat to medium low. Let set for 2 minutes. Add ham, salami, cheddar, g & r peppers, generous salt and pepper. Dot with cream cheese, sprinkle with parsley. Let set for one minute or until eggs are set. Add 3 T salsa. Fold onto plate."

In the "Other Things To Cook Altogether" category, we had tortilla de papas from Marcela, crepes from Pam, soft-shell crabs from Erin, mushrooms, peppers and onions from Countess and Spanish tortillas from water241.

To draw the winner's name I thought it appropriate this time to use my very large All Clad stockpot. Useful for soups. I must say, too heavy for mundane things like pasta water. Revereware has a valuable role to play in real-life kitchens. But I digress.

The names.

Close my eyes, hand into pot.

The winner! Nellie, please contact me by Friday at skyepeale@yahoo.com and I will put you in touch with our gracious CSN representative.

Thank you everyone for participating. I find I love to give stuff away, so if I have anything to say in the matter, there will be more chances in the future. I swear I'd like to give each and everyone of you a present.

Would You Like To Win A Copper-Clad Omelette Pan?

It's time for another giveaway.The fine folks at CSN Stores got in touch with me. CSN has all sort of online shops - they supplied the Rowallan jewelry keep last year. The company also sells mattresses, garden furniture, and things like TV stands. They appear to do almost no marketing, except this bit where they contact bloggers and offer to give goods away. It's an interesting business model, were I still in the business of business models. But I digress.

This giveaway also boasts a harmonic convergence of epic proportions. In this case, a reader request for my simple spinach and goat cheese omelette recipe, and recent forays to France, converge at an All-Clad, copper-covered, 8-inch frying pan. I have one just like it. You also get some cleaner. Because you may like to keep your copper looking like, um, copper.

All you have to do is leave a comment below telling us about the first omelette you ever ate. Or your favorite omelette recipe. Or, what else would you use an 8-inch frying pan for? Imagination is a good thing.

The first time I ever had an omelette was on Mont St. Michel, in France. The year must have been 1977. Yes, some of us were alive and eating omelettes back then. My sister and I spent that summer traveling through France. We took a train out from Paris, if I remember, to see the small island. Omelettes were famous on Mont St. Michelle. Still are, although now it's quite a tourist industry. My sister and I just sat, and ate the souffled omelettes, in wonder at how delicious they were. Then we got back on the train, if I remember, and went back to Paris.

Nowadays I eat omelettes because they a) are full of protein b) make a good container for vegetables c) use few dishes d) are easy to make, after 30 years of practice.

Omelettes are also the key to entering the kingdom of High WASPs. Surprised? Have you ever watched the original Sabrina? (*cue sound of 15-year old Lisa, sighing*). Audrey Hepburn comes home from Paris, having learned how to cook an omelette. Which causes Humphrey Bogart, eldest son of the estate, to fall in love with her. Oh, indeed, it's a terrible story from the perspective of class and gender. But what do we know at 15?

Do you need any more encouragement? Here's my recipe.

Ingredients:
3 eggs
(1 tbsp of water or milk is sometimes advised. I fail to notice any impact whatsoever)
Some goat cheese from California. Just because.
Two handfuls of frozen or fresh spinach
Butter
Salt
Pepper

Required Tools:
8-inch frying pan
Fork or spatula
Small mixing bowl
Strainer

Steps:
Let me say first that despite my experience in Mont St. Michelle, I don't cook souffled omelettes for myself. Jan does, here. I will be trying this recipe, and it may change my life forever.

Neither do I like the thin rectangular egg sheets that pass for omelettes at many diners, nor the masses of compacted scrambled eggs often seen in Northern California breakfast havens. I like my omelettes tender, moderately fluffy, and cooked all the way through. Just like salmon. Except the fluffy part.

So the entire art to omelettes is what you do in the 45 seconds between when the egg hits the pan and when you fold the resultant material over whatever filling you've put inside.

First, get your goat cheese out of the refrigerator, where you keep it, although you wonder if you're doing something declasse keeping cheese too cold. Unwrap it. Put it on a cutting board. Wonder why on earth no one has solved the problem of good/reusable cheese packaging. Separate 4-5 clumps of goat cheese from the mother ship, each about the size of a teaspoon. Put the cheese back in the refrigerator and quiet your inquiring mind.

Second, take out the butter, and some spinach. If you are using fresh spinach, be virtuous, take out olive oil which is good for your heart, and saute at low heat until wilted. Not your heart, the spinach. Then dump said spinach into a strainer. Probably good to squish a little, overly wet fillings are anathema to omelettes.

If you are using frozen spinach, put it in a glass bowl with a little water, cover with a paper towel, and microwave it for a minute until thawed. Then dump the spinach into a strainer and proceed to the squishing.

Third, take that SAME glass bowl from the microwaving process, (you see, the goal is to have as few dishes to wash as possible), once it's cooled down, and crack in 3 eggs. Some people will tell you to use 2 eggs. In my opinion, 3 is perfect, leading to the right balance of you-can-cook-all-the-egg and the-resultant-egg-layer-is-substantial. Mix until whites and yolks are one yellow mass. If you don't, you'll get streaks of egg white - like fried eggs - in your omelette. To me that is a sign of a Diner Omelette and is not my preferred mode. To each his or her own, however. In all my 30 years of cooking the Omelette Police have never paid me a visit. I believe them to be apocryphal.

Fourth, light a medium-high burner under your frying pan. Go get slice a tablespoon of butter off a stick and walk across the kitchen balancing the butter on your knife, hoping it doesn't slip. Throw it into the pan. Let it melt, then foam up, but not burn. As you can see, sometimes one forgets to pay attention and butter browning commences. Forgive yourself. This is not the worst thing one can fail to notice in a lifetime.

Swirl the butter around so that all the pan is covered. Or spread the butter around with a spatula. This is effective, just less graceful.

Now pour in all the eggs. If there's an art to omelettes, here's the moment. This is my way - taught me by my mother. There are other ways, and other mothers in the world.

• Let the egg cook for 5 seconds. You will see the edges foam and puff a little bit.
• Start to shake the pan gently. The egg mass will loosen. Move it from side to side inside the pan just a bit.
• Take your fork and hold its tines horizontal to the layer of egg that has cooked, stirring the uncooked liquid. Do this for 5 seconds.
• Now move your fork down towards the pan, keeping the tines horizontal. Do this in an area halfway between the center of the pan and the edge. Use the flat fork to press on the cooked egg layer and pull it away from the edge, towards the center.
• Tilt the pan so the edge you've pulled the egg away from is down.
• Liquid egg will run into the now-empty part of the pan.

• Repeat all around the egg mass, fairly quickly, making sure you are creating a circular form of cooked egg, and letting the uncooked egg run UNDER and AROUND the cooked part, so that it gets cooked in turn.
• Once the egg is mostly done, you can pick up the edges of the cooked circle here and there so the last bits of liquid egg run out and cook. If you're obsessive about raw egg, *raises hand*, you can scrape any liquid left over the edge of the cooked mass onto the pan surface.

Now it's time to put in the filling. Place the gobs of goat cheese at regular intervals on one side of the egg mass. Now spread the spinach on top of the cheese. Tilt the pan and slide the omelette in one direction, up the side of the pan, about an inch. Then pick up the edge of the omelette that's still on the flat part of the pan, and fold it over on top of your fillings.

Turn off the heat, leave the omelette to sit in the pan for a minute so the cheese will mostly melt. Salt. Pepper. Serve. Goes well with whole grain toast.

Now I'm hungry. The winner will be drawn next Tuesday, June 7th. Please enjoy.

They specified that I say the words, "TV Stands," linked, up here at the top of this post. Why "TV Stands," I can't tell you. But it seemed a reasonable price to pay. Think about it, if someone said to you, "Say, 'TV Stands' and I will give you a copper frying pan," wouldn't you do it?

BTW, The Cape House is ALSO hosting a CSN giveaway, in her case for a gift card. Go here and double your chances.

Images:
Frying pan from CSN
Mont St. Michel
Omelette in process, me

Would You Like To Win A Fab Shirt From NaraCamicie SF?

Well guess what? We have another giveaway today. I feel like a kid.

Giveaways are not too common here on Privilege, as I don't feel right giving away anything I don't know that I want myself. But this time, the prize is a very generous gift certificate from the NaraCamicie store in San Francisco, for $175.00. Yes. Generous.

If you all remember, NaraCamicie is where I found this shirt.

Which I love and have already worn repeatedly.

Here are some bad pictures that I took of other shirts in the store. Also some pocket squares. Cute, no?

A Jackie O, '60s sort of vibe going on

Color...

Crisp, classic, the Sturdy Gal dresses for lunch

Yes, BTW, that is some orange going on you see behind the more traditional red striper.

And here are some good pictures from the Italian NaraCamicie catalogue.

For the nautical among us

Daring garden party gear

Anyway, after I posted about my original purchase, Margaret, the owner of the SF store, found me and emailed to say thank you. She then took me for lunch, and a tour of her store. It was really fun. She showed me books and catalogues from her time at Versace. I almost got lost in a dream of my parallel life as a trophy wife on Capri. I recovered. Good thing, too.

I wanted to thank her for her kindness, and it occurred to me that this was an opportunity for that elusive "win-win" that we used to banter about in the corporate world, jaws squared, and desire for profit paramount. Only this really did seem to be win-win. Margaret gets to show off her wonderful shirts to this audience, and one of you gets to win a generous prize. My favorite type of business deal.

So here's the plan. We'll communicate without Powerpoint, shall we? Leave a comment below to enter. I would like to hear about a piece of clothing that was special to you, anything, for any reason. Or about one of the shirts you see here, and how you might wear it. I love your stories and this is a good excuse for more.

Please confirm that you either subscribe to this blog via the RSS feed or the Google Followers widget, or simply that you are not scanning the wide Internet for prizes and pouncing on our little corner like a hawk on a fieldmouse. If you blog or tweet about Margaret's lovely wares, you get two entries. I will keep the comments open until Sunday of this week, draw randomly, and announce the winner next Monday or Tuesday.

Since NaraCamicie San Francisco doesn't have an e-commerce site (they are store specific in the US), you will fulfill your winnings either by phone, or by coming into the store if you happen to be in San Francisco. The store personnel are used to working in this manner, and can send photos, emails, etc. to help hone in on the right purchase.

In order to make this giveaway open to everyone here, I will pay for any overseas shipping if one of you beautiful people from Finland, or Scotland, or England, or France, or Australia, or Hong Kong, or wherever, should happen to win.

Thank you in advance to everyone. To Margaret for such a fun giveaway, to you, the readers, for, well, um, reading.

How To Give Away A "Keep"

First read all the comments under your giveway post. Be profoundly cheered by a flock of adventures almost like birds in the sky.

Then ask your daughter to help write a list of all the entries to make sure nothing falls through any cracks. Go to the mall thinking you will buy place setting cards from Crane to write names on but then realize that they cost $1.00 apiece and you need a total of 115. Debate the purchase anyway because it would be fun but the Sturdy Gal is whispering in your ear so buy a roll of Tiffany blue wrapping paper and proceed to cut slips and write out names.

Realizing that there are too many slips of paper to fit into your silver bowl, retrieve the large glass piece from the cupboard, fill it with slips, and mix them up.


Close your eyes. Reach in and mix some more. Grab a slip. Then make your daughter take a picture of your hand in the bowl. Keep your eyes closed. You ask your daughter to turn all the slips over so only blue shows. Because you are picky like that.

Then, eyes still closed, turn over the winner. Tada!


Feel briefly embarrassed that you have terrible handwriting, but put that aside and wish Plus Size Bride a big congratulations!

So hooray! Congratulations! The CSN stores representative will be getting in touch! Please email me with the contact information I should pass on! Now I will go figure out how to do this again. Or something similar. Thank you all so much for participating.

And It Comes In Pink, Too.

Giveaway here. Rowallan jewelry "keep" or other nifty things from Luggage.com. The keep, BTW, also comes in pink. For my preppy blogger friends:).

Voila.

Have disabled comments here to make sure they are all in one place and nobody gets lost. Here the stories of adventures are amazing.

A Rowallan Jewelry "Keep"

Privilege is giving away something to make your travel more, well, privileged. And in our tradition of deconstruction, you can define privilege however you like.

But first, the story of this giveaway. I had been contacted by more companies than made sense. Always fun, secretly thrilling and all that. But they wanted me to promote things like orthodonture, or Russian diamonds, or gypsy pendants. Didn't seem to make sense. Then the kind people at CSN Stores got in touch. They run www.luggage.com. This did make sense. Especially since I planned to start writing about travels.

However, I didn't want to give you all anything without testing it first. So, I bought one for myself. I wanted something that a) could hold my watch, some earrings, a necklace, and maybe even a bracelet, without damage b) would fit into my carryon for those times when I had to check a suitcase. This Rowallan "keep" as they call it, is so cute I want to feed it and let it sleep at the foot of my bed.

It's tough to travel with jewelry. Without a good case, necklaces tie themselves into knots from which they cannot be rescued and earrings say goodbye to their mates never to return. And, if you check luggage, heaven help the poor soul who entrusts her *precious* to the recesses of the baggage system. Confession. Jewelry does bring out my inner Gollum.


Rowallan, to make this sweeter, is a Scottish company. They make things for Queen Elizabeth. Yes. The Grande Practical Dame is enthralled by the click of the hardware alone.


One of you can win this "keep." Or, if you prefer, you can choose something else at Luggage.com. Anything within an $80.00 limit. I know, isn't that generous? Please just do one or several of these things. As I understand it, I'm following the giveaway protocol. If I'm wrong, please let me know. Immediately. Or I will have nightmares when I find out I was inappropriate.

1. Comment below. Tell me the most interesting place you have ever traveled to. Interesting being loosely defined. One chance.
2. Either remind me you follow Privilege already or sign up to follow now. Two chances.
2. Post about the giveaway on your blog, Facebook, or Twitter. Social media of choice. Let me know you have done so. Three chances.
3. Go dance naked in the rain. Four chances. Um, I think I'm kidding there.

On Sunday of this week, November 22nd, I will pick a winner at random. Either I will figure out the random number generator, or I will put slips into a bowl. Probably a silver one. For fun. I don't think they make silver random number generators.

Here's to presents, large and small. I hope to have others for you as time goes by.

Note: I also picked CSN because they are large and reputable. (I'd be OK with small and reputable.) They want me to tell you that they have sites like Mattresses too. I just couldn't figure out a good way to give anyone a mattress. Have you ever noticed that it's one of those words you better not say over and over again?

Note: So much for grand capitalist schemes. To make anyone at any and all regulatory agencies happy, I received nothing in exchange for what I am about to say. Except the chance to do something fun by giving a present. Not even an affiliate link, although I reserve the right to do that in the future if I figure out how and get over my embarrassment.