Goose egg!!! (and hens egg) Tortilla (Spanish style omelette)

1 Goose egg and 6 hens eggs

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, I was unashamedly excited the other day when I walked into my butchers to find the last of a batch of freshly laid goose eggs lying on the counter.
Needless to say I snapped it up before you could say  Ovo Branta Canadensis.
The fact that I now had a goose egg in  possession only affirmed my notion that the perfect lunch for a rare British summer’s day such as the one we were experiencing, given the contents of my larder (and now my shopping bag) would in fact be a Spanish style omelette commonly known as Tortilla.
Traditionally the basic version of this is made with sliced potato and egg, but as ever, I decided to embellish (or desecrate, depending on whether you’re a purist or not…) the dish and use a few extra ingredients….

I started off with:

• A small onion
• A courgette (or zucchini for the Americans amongst you)
• Asparagus (or asparagus for the Americans amongst you… about 8 stalks… I’d already started chopping by the way..)
• 3 small potatoes
• some cherry tomatoes (I only used about 3 or 4 of these)

Ingredients

And some smoked streaky bacon – about 6 rashers -which I sliced up as you can see below:

Bacon

I sliced the potatoes into 1/2 cm slices and par boiled them for 5-7 mins.
Meanwhile I chopped the rest of the ingredients as below……

Chopped ingredients

I also had at hand a few freshly plucked sage leaves from the garden….

Sage

I then fried the bacon in some olive oil for about 5 mins, until the fat started to crisp…

Fried bacon

When the bacon was cooked, I poured out as much of the fat as possible and drained the bacon on some kitchen towel.

Then I used 2-3 tsps of the rendered fat and olive oil from the bowl above to fry/soften/sweat down the vegetables for about 10 mins..

onion, courgette and asparagus in the pan

Meanwhile I prepared the eggs. I used the goose egg and 6 hen’s eggs. In the pic below, you can see the difference in the size of the yolks.

Goose egg and 4 of the hen's eggs

Beat them up….

Beaten eggs (some eggs were harmed in the making of this picture..)

Next I added the potatoes, tomatoes, chopped sage and bacon to the vegetables that had by now softened up nicely in the pan…

Tater's, 'matos and bacon in't pan

Poured in the eggs… and turned on the grill..

Eggs in

After about 10 minutes I could tell the egg had started to set underneath the top liquid layer. To test for this, gentle shake the pan from side to side, and although the top will wobble and slosh, just below it should look fairly solid…

Starting to set

I then put the pan under a medium grill for about 5 mins to set the top. It came out looking like this, ready to serve.

After being under the grill for 5 mins

Now came the most important maneuver of the whole process: getting the tortilla the right side up on a plate.
Having carefully removed the pan from the grill with a cloth due to the hot handle, I let it cool for a minute, since a clumsy accident at this stage would have resulted in the waste of the industrious efforts of the last 1/2 hour, and a precious goose egg…
Finding a plate which neatly matched the size of the pan, I held it over and upended the whole arrangement.

Luckily, it came out as pictured below:

The tortilla, ready to eat...

It had burnt a bit on the bottom as you can see, but in reality, although not to aesthetically pleasing, the onions and veg had caramelised nicely resulting in a sweet nutty flavour.

Although it’s probably best with a crisp green salad, on this occasion I chose to eat it with two generously buttered sliced of white toast. Any complaints about this can be left in the comments at the end of the post…. 🙂

Tortilla and toast...