I raised my head from the keyboard with a start.
Something is burning
.
A strong smell of toasted egg has grabbed my nostrils like a goat hook.
I have been fighting with words since eight in the morning, abstracted from the real world, digging in the dirt at the foot of the trunk of this column like a wild boar looking for truffles, without success.
I'm slow at writing.
I usually plant the seeds for Friday columns the weekend before.
I write down in my notebook phrases, shocks, fleeting reflections that may have been provoked by everyday life, Twitter tantrums or conversations in secret WhatsApp groups, and I leave them there, to their own devices, to see if they prosper and germinate, rot. and they die, or they dry up and are blown away by the first wind that passes.
On Mondays I take a look at the notebook.
Of everything scribbled, generally only one or two of the notes are still alive, piquing my interest.
The rest pass like shooting stars.
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I firmly believe that it is the interest of the writer that makes a topic interesting.
Hunger, more than content.
Cooking can fill millions of pages with relatively little effort, but stripped of what is not strictly itself, it is one of the most boring subjects that exist.
Someday we should talk about that.
Coming out of my reverie due to the smell of burning, I took a quick look at the watch.
It's half past seven in the afternoon, the time we usually have dinner.
Shit
.
I rushed out of the attic office, rushed down the stairs towards the living room and almost ran into my daughter, who came out of the kitchen, cheerful but thoughtful, wiping her hands with a cloth, in an attitude of evaluating the facts. wearing a monocle.
“I made myself an omelet, but it didn't turn out very well,” she tells me as she passes by.
She is 11 years old.
The sulfurous stench of toasted egg, which has nothing to do with the sweet and buttery creaminess of the omelette, comes from the surrounding egg remains stuck to the pan that rests on the induction hob.
The mechanism is off, but the plate is one of the old and cheap ones, and it stays hot for a long time after being deactivated.
"Did you eat it?" I say, slowing down.
Do you want me to prepare something else for you?
I'm sorry, I lost my mind, I didn't realize what time it was.
She is very calm.
-No problem.
I've been wanting to make an omelette for days.
The only bad thing is that it didn't turn out well for me.
—I've been wanting to make myself an omelet for days, he said.
I'm screaming with euphoria inside.
Don't ruin it
,
Maria.
—Next time, as soon as you finish making the omelet, remove the pan from the heat you used.
Do you see where an H appears here?
It's H for
hot
.
Leave the pan on one side of the plate, being careful not to touch it with your hand, this way anything that is stuck to it will not burn.
-OK.
—Pour a splash of oil into the pan to prevent the tortilla from sticking.
You must have gotten a little hooked, right?
That makes me very angry.
-Yeah.
Instead of bending she has squashed herself.
She looked terrible.
When you make an omelette, will you teach me?
-Clear.
Made.
But I make it with the small frying pan, which doesn't weigh that much.
—Cool.
She leaves.
I have never started cooking with her in the spirit of guiding her step by step to make a recipe, nor in the spirit of spending an afternoon doing crafts.
What is common at home is that we coincide in the kitchen and that I give him work to do, be it peeling garlic or potatoes, cutting lettuce or cleaning anchovies (how wonderful the grimaces of disgust).
When we meet over pots and pans, I put subtitles on everything I do out loud, like someone who doesn't want to.
He no longer comes home from school to the sound of “I'm hungry”;
She knows that everything she might need for ingredients has always been stored within her reach, and she goes straight to the kitchen to grab a sandwich or get a banana.
I have told him a thousand times that you have to leave everything tidied up and wipe with a cloth after doing anything, but right now I prefer not to go into that topic so as not to spoil his desire to continue deciding to make an omelette and solve dinner on his own.
I want to savor the moment.
I'll move the eggs.
I never taught him how to make an omelet, but somehow he feels the kitchen is a territory as everyday and his as the bathroom, the living room or his room.
This is possibly the gastronomic event of my decade.
More amazing than anything I'd been writing all day.
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