Artistic Pension Payment:  A Lesson in Cooking

My Mother was an excellent cook.  I have many of her fancy pans and other cooking paraphernalia that she considered essential.  However, I was always too busy working and usually single, so I tended to assemble food items rather than create meals.  One of my fancy cooking items was an 8 inch Berndes saute pan.  After listening to a cooking show on NPR, I attempted to fry/steam the perfect egg, later to be laid upon a decorative smear of low-fat plain yogurt and sprinkled with Herbs de Provence.

Day 1:  This perfect egg is cooked in olive oil, with a few drops of water to create steam so that the egg whites are cooked without having to turn the egg.  My Berndes pan didn’t have a lid.  I grabbed the closest sized one, a 7-7/8″ Revereware copper lid.  I planned to trap the steam for only a few seconds in order to cook the white without overcooking the yolk.  But I could not remove the lid! I had created a vacuum, complicated by two different types of metal fused together….in just a few seconds.

I was hungry.  I “Googled” the ways to remove a stuck lid.  None was going to solve the problem before I needed to eat some breakfast and move on to the gym.  I left the pan in the sink, with ice cubes on the copper lid thinking that it would shrink, allowing me to free the eggs.  I ate a banana and left for my Deep H2O class at the YMCA.

I was gone a couple of hours.  I returned to find the lid and pan still stuck, stubbornly. I got a screw driver out of my tool box and tried to leverage the lid off.  I’m not as strong as I thought I was.  I “Googled” again – try putting the pan in the freezer.  So I did, overnight.

Day 2:  The next morning I got the pan out.  Fused and completely frozen.  I thought it would be a good idea to heat the bottom of the pan to again attempt my “different temps will separate the pan from the lid” theory.  After a few seconds, I started worrying that the pan would explode on the heater element, so I put the pan in hot water (same theory.)  Nothing happened, still fused. I left the pan in the sink and went out for a while.  Surely returning to a normal temperature would resolve the problem.  No.  It stayed in the sink over night.

Day 3.  I can still hear the eggs inside the pan when I shake it.  Like ping-pong balls bouncing off a hi-hat.  Maybe I shouldn’t attempt to get these eggs out.  They are starting to stink.  I realize I have only been trying to save my Mother’s pan.  I’m too sentimental. I say goodbye.  I have many other “essential” gourmet cooking gadgets I can use in my future attempts to be creative.  I toss the pan, still tightly sealed, with the stinky eggs into the dumpster and order a replacement pan on Amazon.  I think my next artistic pension payment will be in another art form.  Watercolor lessons anyone?