Eggs and Omelets ---246

We have always had hens as long back as I can remember, mother bought and reared her day old chicks by the hundreds, they had to be collected from the railway station in boxes, where if you were late collecting them, the station master would put them by the stove in his office "to keep them warm", This would sweat up the chicks then would catch a chill when taken out of the insulated boxes, so it was better to be on the spot when the train came in.

The eggs mother sold to the egg packing station at Gnosall a lorry picked them up every week, the driver paid her for the previous weeks eggs when collecting this weeks.
That meant a steady income of cash from the poultry, and every effort was made not to break or crack any eggs, particularly when us lads were given the job of collecting eggs from the hen pens or field arks in galvanized buckets with a bit of hay in the bottom..
Occasionally you got a soft shelled egg that felt like rubber, or a soft/thin shelled egg which were were almost impossible to carry back to the house. If they were put in the bucket with the others they would squash them, if they went on the top of  the bucket of eggs and then broke it would wet nearly all the eggs right to the bottom, and every egg had got to be wiped clean otherwise they would glue to the cardboard egg trays when packed.
 Any eggs not saleable ( cracked, thin shelled, double yolked or misshapen)went into the pantry where they would be fried or scrambled for breakfast, mother was not too keen on boiled eggs as that would mean using good solid shelled eggs that could have otherwise sold.

Omelets seems to have been a modern sort of way of using eggs, I can never remember mother every making an omelet, right now I have recently aquired an omelet pan, its only about eight inches across.
 Now doing most of my own cooking and watching Jamie Oliver cooking on the TV I've learnt how to cook a mean omelet,  the only thing I forgot to do was to put a spoon full of water in with the whisked eggs before cooking.
One question I would like to ask is why don't you flip/toss an omelet  like ya do a pancake, as I seem to have lost our spatula when we moved house. So in a catalogue that gets shoved through our door once a month, it has all sorts of kitchen gadgets and in it, there was an plastic omelet spatula, and I  bought it. The problem is, I being owd and not familiar with metric measurements, the spatula was 22mm and round, and the pan 8 inches, it's bigger than the bladdy pan, so I got the kitchen scissors out and trimmed half inch off it all round
So next time I may av a go at flipping it with a big dinner plate handy to catch what missed or don't get caught, but it sound like a big mess waiting to happen.
Advice please from those more experienced than I,  "willing to learn"


Being born in a ducks yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.
Hans Christian Andersen  (1805 - 1875)