Take eggs seriously

There's a scene in The Hundred-Foot Journey where an omelette is the test. Not a showpiece, not a tasting menu. An omelette. If you can do that, you can cook.

I think that's right, and it's why eggs are the thing I keep going back to.

They're everywhere and they cost nothing. Nobody's precious about them, so I can try something at seven in the morning, get it wrong, and try again tomorrow. Nothing else in my kitchen has a feedback loop that fast.

They're also harder than they look. Butter, salt and eggs rarely turn out badly, which is what makes them safe to practice on. But the distance between edible eggs and good ones is all technique. Heat, timing, when to season, when to stop. Every one of those shows up again in everything else I cook.

That's what makes it a test rather than a chore. A soft scramble taught me more about low heat and carryover than any piece of meat did. A French omelette is a lesson in nerve, because you have to stop while it still looks underdone. Poaching is water temperature. Fried is fat and patience. One ingredient, four skills, and a month of breakfasts to work through them.

Breakfast is the right place for it. Nobody's waiting, the stove is free, and if it goes wrong I eat it anyway.

None of this is a secret. It's just that eggs are so ordinary that most people never bother to get good at them, and they'll repay the attention faster than anything else on the stove.