About 4 a.m., I was really starting to worry that I had no idea how to cook eggs over easy. As in, I had no idea as to whether that mean the yolks were supposed to be runny (isn't that sunny side up?) or if the term did not refer to the yolks at all.
I was really worried that this shift at the homeless shelter wasn't going well.
See, there's supposed to be two of us making and serving breakfast. And all the other times I volunteered, the other guy pretty much did it all and just told me to do a few select things: taking egg requests, baking the bacon, cutting boiled potatoes and washing the dishes. I was pretty good at those things. Not so good at cooking eggs to order.
But this time, the other guy didn't show up. So, I sat for an hour figuring he might have just slept through his alarm and would likely appear in any second. (He didn't.) Then, I briefly considered fleeing. No one would notice until I was long gone and back in bed, right? (But that would be wrong.) So, I went and banged on the nursery door until the site manager awoke. The shelter is in a church basement, so thankfully, the nursery was just up a flight of stairs and the woman (also a volunteer) woke up easily.
Less thankfully, she had no idea how to make breakfast either. Our first attempt at making coffee in this mammoth vat with a spigot resulted in volcano-like eruptions of hot coffee out of the top of the vat. I shielded us from the eruptions by putting the top on the vat, but nothing came out the spigot. So, we scrounged up a 10-cup coffee pot and made four pots.
And the homeless people didn't seem to notice that we had no idea what we were doing. She didn't know what eggs over easy were, either, so there were some detailed instructions on preparing eggs. But everyone took it in stride. And the breakfast potatoes were amazing -- mainly, I suspect, because she cooked them with bacon grease. (What the homeless people didn't know about their food couldn't hurt them, right?)
The whole ordeal might provide the perfect argument for upgrading my cell phone to include Internet access. A quick Google search when I got home revealed this recipe - indeed, eggs over easy are what I generally have considered "runny fried eggs." Now I know.
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