While I rave online about the French food I've tasted during my trips to France I can't muster up any enthusiasm to cook French food at home. It all seems so dauntingly complicated.
Then I happened onto the movie trailer for Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep. It's about a girl named Julie who takes on French cooking: 524 recipes in 365 days with Julia Child as her guide.
I checked out Julia Child on YouTube and immediately found the 6-minute video of her explaining how to make a French omelette. Julia asks "and what makes the perfect omelette?" and answers "it's how fast you take to do it. An omelette takes 20 seconds to do, is all"
Well, she had me at "20 seconds"! How could I resist that? I signed right up. Signed onto my Amazon account and had Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck delivered to my door two days later.
Once I held the book in my hand I kinda' felt a little cheesy. Like I had ordered some superflous gadget from a late-night tv shopping show. Who needs eight pages to explain how to make an omelette? Wasn't the six-minute video enough instruction?
I decided to make something "cheesy"- it only seemed appropriate. So l'omelette au fromage it was. The next choice concerned technique. I decided against l'omelette brouillée because I didn't want to beat up my pan handle to loosen the eggs. I picked l'omelette roulée because jerking and tilting the pan, cooking and serving up the eggs without any utensils seemed the the flashier move and more fun!
The results thus far have fed me for the last five days and counting. I didn't think I liked omelettes that much. But when I make it for someone else, it does smell and look so delicious that I have inevitably ended up making one for myself, too.
The recipe from Mastering the Art of French cooking:
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/child/recipe.html
Julia Child demonstrating how to make rolled omelettes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWmvfUKwBrg
Watch the trailer for Julie & Julia here:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/julieandjulia/
La photo: Supposed fragment of Roland's Sword, Durendal, at Rocamadour, France. Mai 2009
The word omelette, according to the new Oxford American dictionary is an alteration of alumette, a variant of alumelle from lemele which means knife blade. "The association with knife blade is probably because of the thin flat shape of an omelet".
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