The Breakfast of Bachelions, or, Omeletastic!

About author / Josh Gunn

Bachelor chef; southern cooking; mixologist; university professor. Josh's recipes will delight (and sometimes terrify) you.

Bachelors worthy of autonomy have got to do something about their breakfasts. What is up with the dried cereal flakes with water y'all? That's just nasty. Cold pizza? Barf. Oatmeal? Ok, that's more respectable, but still: where's the freshliciousness? If you cannot do better than oatmeal, you deserve to move back in with mother.

To avert that fate, I have a dandy suggestion that will not only impress your friends, but tastes good too: omelets with fresh veggies! Now, at first blush the suggestion that you should make omelets on a regular basis sounds time consuming and fancy-pants. But really, it's easy and quick if you understand the secret terms: "pre-chopped," "frozen," "packaged," and "cartonized eggs." Lemme address each term in turn. Actually, lets go crazy like the artist formerly-and-then-presently-known as Prince and do it backwards ("Darling Nikki," anyone?).

Cartonized eggs: in your local supermarket's dairy and eggs section you'll find these handy milk-cartons full of molten, pre-beaten eggs. No eggs to crack, you just pour the goop into the pan. The groovy thing about this product is that the companies that make this stuff magically remove all the cholesterol, and the actual cooked egg looks prettier than a real egg (it's uncannily yellow, like eggs you see in television commercials).

Oh, and I reckon I should not assume y'all know how to make an omelet, so here's how: spray a 10-12" non-stick pan with cooking spray, heat medium-high, wait for the pan to get hot, and then dump in some cartonized egg. When the egg is semi-slimy you can put stuff on one side of it, like cheese, and then you flip the egg-pancake in half when it's almost non-slimy.

Now, a real omelet is made French-style, which requires a pat of butter heated until its almost brown, then three eggs, lightly beaten with a couple of dashes of Tabasco sauce, which is then poured into the hot pan with the now-brown butter liquid and, basically, you fry that puppy somethin' fierce. After I turned thirty my doctor insisted my love of omelets would have to do without the butter—either that or I'd have to get down with prescription statins. It's true that the cartonized egg lacks the yummy punch of regular eggs, so sometimes I cheat: I'll mix two eggs and then cartonized egg, or pull a half-and-half.

Ok, so what do you put in your omelet? Think frozen. If you're a bachelor, it's hard to keep fresh veggies in the fridge all the time (I mean, it's not like you're feeding a family of four). One great alternative is to buy some frozen veggies and then microwave them for your omelet. I keep a bag of frozen broccoli florets in the freezer for my omelets. Spinach works too, but I'd just say no to the peas and carrots medley.

A small handful of frozen veggies zapped for a minute produces some fairly decent omelet fodder (canned veggies do not), which I can then put into my omelet with pre-shredded cheese. And the pre-shredded cheese brings us to our third secret term: packaged. Dudes, pre-shredded, packaged cheese makes your life so easy. You just open the bag and dash a handful into your omelet and you're done.

Or almost done, because we have pre-chopped to deal with. One of the glories of bachelordom is maximum efficiency buoyed by laziness. Every week I chop up an onion and a bell pepper, mix them together, and keep them in one of those cheap, dishwasher safe but disposable containers.

This is nice to have handy because onions and bell pepper can be sautéed into countless dishes, and they make especially good ingredients for omelets. Heck, you don't even need to sauté them—you can dump them right into the egg. Or you can scramble them with eggs. You can even open a can of pig brains, like my grandmother used to do, and scramble them with the onions and pepper and then add the eggs.

I suspect the lot of you reading this didn't know you can get canned pig brains, did you? If so, you're either not from the Deep South or you were born into a wealthy family. For the former folks, next time you're in rural Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi, visit a Piggly Wiggly and head for the "canned meat" section, and there you'll find them. I would agree canned pig brains just sound nasty, and truth be told they taste really, truly, unmistakably nasty. So forget the pig brains. But if you keep the pre-chopped onions and peppers handy, have your pre-shredded packaged cheese and your egg in a carton, you'll be making fresh-ish, brainless breakfasts in no-time.