A Sweet and Savory Omelette

Shopping at the Belle Meade Publix on Sunday morning after working a twelve hour shift is an invitation to do some silly impulse buying. I have a whole duck sitting in my freezer because of this, and one day soon I will have to defrost, then dismember it so I can cook it piece by piece-

Yesterday I bought a cup sized clamshell container of red currants. I bought them because I had never seen a fresh currant before. Currants and gooseberries and rhubarb come from the north country. They will not grow in the South where evening comes early all year and where the Aurora Borealis is never seen. Red currants are exotic fruits here. And expensive. $4.99 a cup. A lot of money to spend on fruit one has no idea what to do with. Muffins came to mind. But that would have been too easy, too reflexive.

I once ate an omelette filled with jelly. I remembered that this morning. Why not mash the currants, saute them in some butter spiced with sugar and a tablespoon of guava jelly and let the sauce evaporate and thicken. Then use it as an omelette filling. The pictures tell the story. After I folded the omelette, I sprinkled it with a little more sugar( I used raw turbinado sugar), and then with a little bit of sea salt.

The omelette was very tasty, and visually stunning. What a dish for a brunch! Or to impress a mother-in-law, or a new boyfriend.

There is something very European about this dish. Northern European. My usual cooking aligns itself with the hot countries, because I live in one. I know little of Irish cooking, or Scandinavian cooking, or English or German cooking. Those cuisines are lacunae in my repertoire- Perhaps I need to branch out-




Easy omelette for those who do not have the confidence that they can cook one.

In a smallish fry pan or a crepe pan, melt a tablespoon or two of butter.
( Your filling should already be prepared and ready.) Beat two eggs in a bowl. When the fry pan is very hot and the butter begins to brown, dump in the eggs. Tilt the pan so the eggs cover the whole surface. Pour on the filling and let the omelette bubble away for a few minutes. Using a spatula, lift an edge gently.If the omelette bottom is blonde turning brown, fold it over itself, as I have shown in the picture. Let it cook another minute or so, then lift it gently to a serving plate. This omelette will serve two restrained people, but I ate the whole thing myself, which is why I walk 2 miles a day.

One final thought. No currants? How about peaches? Mashed mango? Figs! Raspberries or blackberries? Pear preserves. All with a little butter and sugar. Or-baby bananas. I just bought some at the world market.

Weekend Scenes- Percy Warner Park, Nashville Tennessee

We are having a very green and well-watered August. Only a month or so to go till the equinox- And cool and pleasant in the mornings. The Steeplechase course shown here is used once a year for horse racing, but all year for cross-country foot racing, general dog walking, and kite flying. When my sister first visited and looked down on the view here, she told me she thought it looked like Italy. I think it looks like home.

An Easy Summer Vegetable Gratin

I drove out to McNeil's Produce on Highway 100 two days ago, and bought the vegetables for this gratin- two Bradley tomatoes, three 3 inch yellow squash, one six inch zucchini,three 3 inch baby mottled eggplants.

I sliced the tomatoes, sprinkled them with a little sea salt and olive oil and arranged them around the edge of a 9 inch pyrex pie plate,as though they were a crust. I sliced the other vegetables thinly and layered them in the dish, but only after I put them in a bowl and mixed them with a generous coating of sea salt and olive oil. This keeps them moist during baking. Between layers I added grated Pecorino Romano cheese, though I think Parmesan would have worked as well. I used perhaps 3/4 cup of cheese. I also put a layer of cheese on top. Then I slow baked it for 70 minutes at 325 degrees.

So simple, and like so many simple things, so good.

I plan to drive out to McNeil's tomorrow to pick up fresh eggs. I mentioned to Mrs. McNeil that I was only able to get downtown to the Farmers' Market on Sundays, and it hardly seemed worth it since the Amish were not there to sell me their eggs. "I can get you eggs", said Mrs McNeil, "I know a lot of people with chickens running around. And some of those eggs have double yolks too".


And I am happy to report that no one has vandalized the McNeil's stand this summer. Two summers ago someone burned their little shed down. Last summer someone sprayed red paint over it and ruined the vegetables. To quote an old lady I once took care of in the ICU "There is so much meanness around-"

The Annals of Nursing- Junior Year Specialties Winter 1971-Maternal -Child Health

Maternal-Child Health is what I remember the school called it. It was our winter semester. And in that eight weeks, I never saw one child born. Students were many. Pregnant mothers few, for Hanover was a village and the Upper Valley was rural. Each student had been assigned to follow a "clinic mother". We met her at doctor's appointments and followed her progress.Had mine had her baby at the hospital,I would have been there to see it.

My clinic mother was a hippie, or as close to one as one could be in Hanover. She had different ideas about having her baby. She wanted home birth, and she wanted me to be there. "Do not even think about going if she calls you", my instructor warned. And my clinic mother did call me, and I did not go. I heard later that a local GP had gone out into the snow and delivered the baby.

I remember little of the rest of that semester other than distaste, and a terrible boredom. What I thought, could be more mind-numbing than post-partum? And it was during this time that my view on doctors began to change as well.

I was with a woman in labor and was stroking her hair, when an anesthesiologist snarled at me. "I am sure that's nice," he said, "Get out of my way". It has been 40 years, and I still hear it clearly.

A hospital is an Autocracy, not a Democracy, and the Doctor, always and ever, is the Autocrat. I hate autocrats. I hate the second class citizenship of nurses.( I have seen much to resent over 40 years.) And now with the misery of Maternal-Child Health over, I headed into my Operating Room Rotation. I was to spend time boxed in in a small room with medicine's Ultimate Autocrat- the Surgeon.

Ironic then ,that the surgeon I remember best was a civilized and gracious man. I would not see many like him in the future. His name was James Watson, and he was a thoracic surgeon. He was not young, nor was his scrub nurse of decades, a woman named Sue. I would see them at breakfast in the hospital cafeteria morning after morning. I am sure after all the years she had spent with him that she was as close as his wife, probably closer. She knew him inside and out. I was in his OR one morning when Dr Watson gently snapped at Sue. She had handed him the wrong instrument. She took it back from him. He turned away. And when he turned back, she handed it to him again. "That's better', Dr Watson said. Sue looked over at me and winked.

"You would be a natural in the OR", my instructor would say to me. She was gung-ho. A cheerleader. A procurer. She was wrong. I was not a natural for any specialty I saw in my junior year.

And now, bear with me, for I need to expand for a moment on the subject of surgeons. I remember the old joke I heard years ago at the VA hospital:

"Medical doctors know everything, but can't do anything. Surgeons do everything, but don't know anything. Pathologists know everything and do everything, but too late". Witty. And I remember a night at a big city hospital 1200 miles from Hanover. One of the surgical residents came to our ICU to look at a patient who was bleeding post cardiac surgery, She called the attending surgeon, who was not pleased. "Ah", the resident said to me, "The ABC's of Doctor ---. Accuse, blame, and criticize".

Add to this list the free-floating rage of a frustrated surgeon. It looks for a place to land. Scalpels fly. Aortas are ripped, scrub nurses are cut in the leg, or beneath the eye. A surgeon picks up an oxygen monitor and threatens to hit an ICU nurse over the head with it. A surgeon berates a nurse as a god-damned idiot for following another doctor's order for sedating the surgeon's patient. Everything is always someone else's fault. Even when friable tissue too fragile to have been sutured rips apart, it is the nurses' fault. They let the patient's blood pressure get too high. They-.

But enough. I feel I have made my point. Are all surgeons like this? No. But too many are.

I have no time now to take you with me to my Psychiatric Nursing Semester.
I will come back to it. For it was a milestone- the last specialty before the summer. The last time we would be juniors.

Our future was on the other side of August.

Walk with Me

When I started this walk at Edwin Warner this morning, it was 67 degrees. Why do I mention a fact so mundane? I mention it because in mid-August 67 is not a temperature- It is a reprieve.

And for those who may not know this, the Warner Parks were built by the WPA, which Roosevelt used during the Depression to put men back to work.

The Perils of Takeout

Because I was tired, because I had a little money, because I was too lazy to cook, I joined the people I worked with in ordering Mexican a few weeks back. The menu included a sampler- a taco, an enchilada, a tamale, and chilles Rellenos. "That's a lot of food", another nurse warned me. I knew it might be, but I could take what was left over home, and as a friend says"eat on it for days". And I would get the chance to see my beagle dance around on his hind legs when I brought in the boxes. He knows what styrofoam and round foil pans mean.He is certain it will work out well for him. It always does.

I paid $13 dollars and waited with all the rest for the food to come. We sent someone out after it since the restaurant would not deliver. Our emissary came back with 4 big brown bags. People crowded into the lounge trying to figure out what was theirs.

Mine was a grease-stained mega bag of chewy corn tortilla chips. It came with a tub of salsa.. I shoved it into a corner, but when I came back to get it later, it had- as the southerners say" taken legs". I was not angry. I work with people who are poor. I hope one of them took it.

I had another bag with a taco in it. Later, it walked away too. I never had a good look at it.

My sampler was in two round foil pans , each with a cardboard cover. "What is that?", someone asked me. It was a fair question.

The first pan was a mass of brown beans with an Orinoco of yellow cheese flowing through it. I say cheese, though I think it was "Cheese Product", which could have included all things synthetic. I hoped melamine was not one of its ingredients. The bean surface was uneven, It looked like the muddy bank of a watering hole, with animal footprints all over it. I began to excavate, and I found what I believe was the tamale, though it may just have been a corn meal lump. A young Honduran nurse I work with had give me a homemade tamale wrapped in a banana leaf a few weeks earlier. It was good. This one just tasted like more refried beans. The beans and cheese had also drowned the enchilada, which I unearthed next. It was falling apart. It had at one time been stuffed with ground beef, in pieces so small they were almost at the sub-atomic level. I had no doubt, that given time and the right temperature, they might sprout forth into the first bean-beef hybrid. I searched on. No chile rellenos. It had to be in the other pan.

This pan had rice in it, more cheese product, and a hill rising in the center , out of the plain. It was the chile, but what ever it had been stuffed with had long since fled or floated down river. It was poblano colored, and poblano shaped. It had a little poblano bite. It must have been real, though defeated and rubberized into an amorphous greenness.

But was it good? Did I eat it?

Anything tastes good to a hungry night nurse, for night nurses will eat anything, out of anything. I once saw a nurse sitting at the desk eating mac and cheese out of an emesis basin because she could not find a dish. She forked it up with a tongue depressor, because she could not find a fork. I also heard of a nurse who had a friend feed her bits of a burger while the first nurse was doing CPR on and off for over an hour. I know that sounds like an urban legend, but I swear it is true, because even if it hasn't happened yet, somewhere it will. Possibly in this city. Maybe tonight.

Did the beagle get any Mexican? Did he eat it?

A beagle will eat coffee grounds and a filter from the trash.

What do you think?

Sunrise Walk August 8,2011-Edwin Warner Park Nashville