Spanish omelette and salad

Trigger warning: if you’re a musophobe (scared of mice and rats¹) there’s a photo of rats further down. I’ll try to hide it behind a drop-down, but I can’t promise it will work.

This morning started with one of the worst caring tasks: assisting with intimate bathroom issues. Mum needed to provide a faecal sample, but didn’t understand what was needed so called me to help. I did, and I didn’t gag, although only because I was concentrating really hard on not gagging.

Then it was on with socks and shoes, grab the crutches, and out to catch the community bus down to the village. Drop the sample (all sealed up, of course) at the GP surgery, then into the community centre for a coffee until it was time to catch the bus back home again.

I was so busy looking at my phone, doing some historical research for an online friend, that the bus driver had to call me as I would have let him drive straight past, unnoticed, if he hadn’t been looking out for me. Thank you, observant driver!

I got home to find that mum had solved a minor mystery, of why our bird food was disappearing so quickly. Given my trigger warning at the start of the post, it won’t be much of a mystery to anyone reading but, yes – rats. While it was just one rat I was fine with it sneaking a bit of food occasionally, but three rats in one go was a bit much, although I did enjoy watching them working out how to get to the food hanging on a tree branch.

Click here to view the photo, or skip straight to the rest of the post

I went straight (well, straight-ish) on to the Amazon website to buy various humane ‘rats go away’ products, including a large bottle of peppermint oil as rats apparently don’t like the smell of it. Who knew?

Then this afternoon the cleaner came for the second time. I will henceforth refer to her as Lil, which isn’t her name but is what mum calls her when she can’t remember her real name. Mum reluctantly (very reluctantly) allowed me to ask Lil to change the sheets on mum’s bed: I can manage to change them on my little single bed, but mum’s double bed is beyond my balance-ability.

I intended to do duck fried rice for dinner tonight, but when it came to it I just couldn’t face the task of getting the meat off the bone, a task I’ve always disliked. Mum is always asking if there’s anything she can do to help with making dinner, but when I asked her to do this she simply assured me it would be ‘really easy’. So easy she had no intention of doing it herself, apparently.

So instead I did a Spanish-style omelette: over a medium heat, fry together sliced onions (from the freezer) and cubed chorizo (from the fridge²), then add sliced potatoes from a tin and stir together until the potatoes are thoroughly covered in the chorizo-y oil.

In a separate bowl, beat together eggs (4 medium ones gives me 3 portions), smoked paprika, dried herbs, and seasoning.

Reduce the heat to low, then pour the eggs over the rest of the omelette and leave until the edges start to firm up, then pull the edge of the omelette away from the edge of the pan, and tilt the pan so some of the liquid egg flows into its place³. Repeat all round the omelette until there’s not enough liquid egg to pour, then put a lid on the pan and leave for a few minutes until the top of the omelette is cooked. (If your frying pan is grill-proof, you can stick it under the grill instead if you prefer.)

Serve with salad, but be careful with the dressing as you don’t want it to suddenly glug out and douse your nice, freshly-made omelette in half a bottle of vinegarette. (No exaggeration – the poor thing was swimming.)

Now for Only Connect, where I would expect to get fewer right answers than usual because I’m so tired, but it’s Only Connect so I don’t expect to get any right anyway. 🤷‍♂️

---

1. Or ‘rice and mats’ as I nearly typed. 🤦‍♂️ ↩︎
2. Ready-chopped chorizo is one of those products I always rather sniffily disdained, but it’s so much easier, if not quite as flavoursome. ↩︎
3. If that makes sense? Please let me know on Facebook if it doesn’t, as I haven’t yet got round to fixing the missing comments section here. Tomorrow, I promise. Or sometime this week, at least. ↩︎