The Yolk's on me.

I am a little accident-prone, the illustration above is of the aftermath of a pez truck that encountered the underside of my foot. A couple cola-flavored candies were lost that day. I am no stranger to breaking objects and enduring personal injury as a result of my own inadvertent doing, and sometimes not so smart maneuvers (I give you welding while wearing sandals and socks, in hindsight, wrong for more than one reason.) Most recently, my left hand is still a little tender from it’s encounter with a chain link fence when I looked over my shoulder while in motion on a bicycle; my college roommate has quite the collection of glued back together knick-knacks; there’s a broken shredder out there because I wanted to see what shiny mylar would look like in little slivers. Okay, that last part was not so much an accident as it was a lapse in impulse control. At any route, breaking things isn’t so hard for me to do. I cracked and egg over the pan today, upon exiting it’s shell, the yolk grazed my finger and separated itself from its little bubblyness. When it hit the pan it was fusing with the white, and I had to take a moment to simmer myself down. No spatula slamming, no fit throwing. This is what I am working on. Calm. It’s just an egg, but darn it all, I wanted it to be fried, not flawed.
Fried eggs are a recently new addition to my diet, I used to only eat a version of scrambled eggs that I cooked until they were a dry flaky weirdness and then doused with Red Hot. Now, if not fried, they might be omletted with various types of cheese or sautéed mushrooms, maybe some spinach or sun dried tomatoes. One yummy version comes from left over Dal Sagg and either munster or armenian string cheese, depending on what we have. There was a salmon scramble option at brunch the other day, and I broke my “if I can eat it, I will eat it” mission statement. Another day, another day. But the thing about the eggs, you see, they don’t always come out perfect every time. Sometimes the yolk breaks right away. And you’ve got the option to scramble the mistake right then and there, but then it’s just a stirred up mess at that point, no slightly browned slices of fresh garlic, no asparagus cooked in olive oil, nothing. Just a deflated defeated slop. You could still throw it in the rice you cooked and slosh on some Dr. Bragg’s and Siracha Sauce and call it a day and it will be almost just as good, but it’s not the same when you’ve got it in your mind to have that orangey yellow eruption with intention.
There’s been an occasion or two where the shell-to-pan transfer is a success, and then somewhere in the flip, there’s a flop and the goo bubbles out from underneath as it solidifies, but I think the worst is when everything else go well, and when you get it to the plate, you find it to be overdone. I’m trying to pay attention to the details, which brands of eggs seem to be more prone to success or failure. The size, shape, and color are factors. Brown eggs, more brittle than the harder shelled whites, tend to splinter and poke holes in my yellows, for example. Googling tells me that fresh eggs produce the best shape when frying. Hmmmm, our lease agreement specified no babies or dogs, I don’t remember anything in there regarding poultry...