September 30, 2019

Masala Omelet

dani@slyrooster.com Breakfast breakfast, egg sandwich, Indian, light supper, lunch 3 Comments

For those of you home this morning and possibly heading off to temple for the Jewish holiday, you’re in for a treat! For all the rest, you may just have to wait until the weekend unless you decide to try out this recipe as a quick but satisfying lunch or even light dinner.

Oftentimes I will come across a recipe that I just can’t get off my mind until I get around to making it. That was the case with this Masala Omelet but it was also the article that ran with the recipe in the June 12, 2019 issue of The Washington Post that really struck a chord. The last line in particular, when the author, Kari Sonde, asks her father how he felt about having to make she and her sister breakfast for some 24 years and his reply, “It’s the best part of my day.”

I feel pretty much that same way about making my family dinner. I love the creativity of cooking, the immediate gratification, the experimentation, but most significantly, I realized many years ago, it’s my way of expressing love. With dinner (not breakfast, which in my house is most often a bowl of cereal), each night I am able to show my family just how much I love them and it’s the best part of my day.

So a couple of weeks after this recipe ran, with it still floating around my consciousness, I pulled the newspaper from my “to get to” stack of recipes, and started on my own Masala Omelet. Two omelets, actually, because the few ingredients, minced especially small, and the two eggs yield two fantastically delicious omelets, each sandwiched between two slices of toasted white bread if you follow the authors instructions. As I was preparing the ingredients, I immediately understood the appeal to the author’s dad. Finely chopping the red onion, tomato, cilantro, and jalapeño was a hypnotic task in the quiet of the morning. With such small amounts needed, it was relaxing versus laborious. Once all of my ingredients were prepped and the spices pulled from the pantry (note that I replaced red chili powder with cayenne, not sure if that’s sacrilege), I set a small non-stick omelet pan over heat and whisked my eggs and popped the first two pieces of bread in the toaster. My first omelet sandwich came together with timed precision as if I’d been making Masala Omelets my entire life. I confidently followed up with the second and envisioned making these for a crowd just as the author’s father did for many weekend brunches.

I sent a photo of my Masala Omelet to an Indian friend, Ami, and asked her if this was really a thing. Her reply, “Oh yeah, it’s a thing!” She went on to tell me that there is a guy in her hometown in India who had a stall behind the railway station. “It was so nasty. Just for local types,” she explained. It became so famous that now he has small stalls all around the city and he has locations in New York and Dubai. They are tourist attractions and all he sells are Masala Omelets. Now he drives around their hometown in a Mercedes!

So there you have it, the ultimate rags to riches story that began with a simple egg sandwich. Enjoy!

Note: The author really does recommend eating the omelet on buttered, toasted white bread–with ketchup, no less! Sounded very American to me but seems to be the case. I’ve been cutting the recipe in half, to make my own tasty breakfast sandwich, which I most often eat on a toasted English muffin. You can certainly enjoy this omelet without bread, sans ketchup and possibly with a dollop of yogurt if you prefer. Or it is plenty tasty on it’s own.