Maitake Omelet

      The recent availability of uncommon mushrooms at our local grocer has been a wonderful addition to meals here at Roseholme Cottage.  Over the weekend, Tamara and I were discussing maitake mushrooms -- sometimes known as Hen of the Woods -- and the idea of putting them in an omelet came up.  I'm not sure which of us mentioned it first, but the rich, complex flavor of maitake was such a good fit to an omelet that we agreed it had to be tried and I made a point of buying some when I went shopping Sunday.

      (Yesterday also marked my first visit to Target in more than a year!  Still much as it was, though they do appear to have all-new and frequently-washed shopping carts, a change I would have been delighted with even before the pandemic.)

      This morning, I fried three strips of bacon and afterward, a nice amount of maitake mushrooms in a little bit of bacon grease.  I'd already made omelet batter with a couple of large multi-grain crackers, crushed with  Italian seasoning blend and then added water and beat three eggs into it. And I'd diced a heaping tablespoon of Bellevitano cheese.

      With the bacon and mushrooms draining on paper towel and the burner turned down to low, I poured the batter into my Always pan -- the non-stick surface is great for this -- and offset it a bit so one side would cook first.  Once it had started to set, I added about half the cheese on both sides, followed by half the bacon.  Half of the mushrooms all on the slow-cooking side after that, then the rest of the bacon and cheese and the remainder of the mushrooms on that.  Folded the faster-cooking side over with my nifty omelet-folding spatula,* centered the pan over the burner, and finished the delightfully-fat omelet in a few iterations of turning it over until moth sides were a nice golden color and the filling was bubbling at the edge.

      The result was even better than we expected.  Tam and I both found it required no additional seasoning.  We'll be having this again!
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* I am generally skeptical of single-purpose kitchen tools but these large, asymmetrical soft-edge spatulas are perfectly suited to the job of folding an omelet, much better than any other method or gadget I have used.