Earlier today, I decided to scramble some eggs for a quick, nutritious midafternoon meal. I used some storebought onion, some zucchini from the Mother Thing, and some eggs from a friend's chickens. As I started, I realized that many folks don't seem to know basic home cooking, so I snapped some photos along the way.
Heat a skillet
American electric stovetops have a dial from low to high, and I set it to a happy medium. The same basic idea applies to gas ranges and their numbered dials. High is for boiling water fast. Low is for just keeping things warm and simmering. Everything in between is for fine-tuning the cooking speed. Some cookware should not be used on high heat, and some foods should be cooked hot and fast. But when in doubt, medium is where you should begin. this, of course, is hotly debated when it comes to eggs. In any case, add a splash of olive oil or a pat of butter.
Dice onion and zucchini
Chop it as small as you like, then add it to the skillet once it has come up to temperature. We want to saute the onion and soften the squash before we add the eggs. One-skillet meals are often cooked step-by-step, and sauteing some diced onion is a good starting point for many other dishes.
Add eggs
Note that sometimes fresh eggs may contain surprises, so I recommend always breaking them one at a time in a separate small bowl before combining them. 99% of the time, it just means a few extra dishes to wash, but every once in a while, it averts disaster.
Scramble
Stir the eggs into the cooked onions and squash, and keep stirring it while it cooks together. In just a few minutes, the eggs will clump into fluffy curds.
It's OK if a little bit sticks to the pan, because try as I might, anything short of a brand-new teflon-coated pan of forever chemicals, some will stick. Ceramic or stainless steel with oil isn't too hard to clean up if you don't scorch it completely.
Enjoy!
I think it's obligatory to add that command to a cooking post. I seasoned it with garlic salt. Pepper is always a good option. I would have added some salsa, but I'm out.
Sorry, some steam was messing with the camera lens.
Other options
Scrambling eggs with other additions is easy. Fried diced potatoes, diced bell peppers, browned Italian sausage left over from making pizzas, diced ham... if it would go well in an omelette, toss it in with the scramble instead. Breakfast, or any meal, can be a nutritious home-made, and even mostly-locally-sourced DIY affair with little effort.
Render what, and to whom?
While I was cooking, this was playing in the background. As I said in a snap earlier, the "render unto Caesar" passage is hotly debated whenever politics & religion collide. We all tend to have modern biases that we read into any ancient literature, whether religious or otherwise. The context this episode adds is helpful.
As the host says, the gospels were written as narratives in the tradition of ancient biographies to tell about how Jesus was the Messiah subverting many expectations held by His people, and confounding their ideas about how we relate to God and man alike. Working out how that applies to us today can be more complicated than we expect due to 2000 years of time on top of the challenge of translating anything from one language to another.
How then are we to live? Blind obedience? Open rebellion? Something else? Unraveling the competing ideas about life today is not simple, and lazy claims based on mistranslated scripture help no one. Nothing was properly Caesar's. He was a usurper, a tyrant, an invader, and a military conqueror without any claim to voluntary consent. Today, nothing belongs to our governments if they are representative republics serving us instead of imposing an empire upon us as its subjects.
We want to live at peace with our neighbors, but the State is built on war and theft. We cannot claim to love our neighbor while begging the government to rob him, punish him for his vices, or send him abroad to kill strangers. A man cannot serve two masters, so at some point, we all must choose one to love and one to hate. Christ, or the State, never both.
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