THE PHILOSOPHY OF BREAKING EGGS

Alas, Ladarat’s luck didn’t last, although the evening started out well enough. Ladarat arrived at Duanphen’s stall just after the dinner rush. By the time she’d driven across town and parked her car in her driveway, noting with annoyance that Wiriya hadn’t yet arrived, and then walked around the corner, Duanphen had the makings of yam khor moo yang ready and waiting.

Duanphen vetoed Ladarat’s suggestion of kai jiew moo ssap.

“Eeeyyy, no, Khun. That is the worst idea ever. If I make that omelet now, it will be cold by the time you get home. And cold kai jiew moo ssap? No good.” She shook her head, thinking for a moment.

“Can you … make an omelet, Khun?”

Could she? She’d never made one before. But that’s not the same thing as saying that she couldn’t. Maybe she could.

Duanphen was watching her expectantly, so she nodded in a way that she hoped would inspire confidence.

Duanphen seemed satisfied. “All right, then. You will make kai jiew moo ssap on your own. Not deep-fried, of course. No, too messy. But a simple omelet, hot off the stove.” She paused. “You do … have a stove, do you not, Khun?”

Ladarat nodded earnestly.

“And a frying pan?”

Ladarat nodded again, with a bit less confidence. There were pans in the cupboard, she knew. She’d seen them the last time she’d looked, which was … oh … well … a while ago.

Whether they were exactly the sort of equipment one might use for the operation of frying, she couldn’t say. But that wasn’t important, was it? What was important, certainly, were the ingredients. If she got the right ingredients from Duanphen—and, of course, if she had adequate stores of enthusiasm—what could possibly go wrong?

That seemed to be Duanphen’s hope, too, more or less. She carefully doled out all of the ingredients that Ladarat would need into a towering stack of cardboard containers.

“My son made me change from Styrofoam,” Duanphen explained. “He says it’s bad for the environment.” She shrugged. “I guess it really doesn’t matter, and this cardboard is cheaper. But it’s hard to get used to.”

There were the grilled pork and vegetables and sticky rice, and a container for chili sauce and another for dipping sauce. And spring onions and holy basil leaves. Then, for the omelet, four eggs, minced smoked pork, and a small plastic containers of Golden Boy sauce, which Duanphen added after asking if Ladarat had any on hand and receiving a blank look in return.

“So now you’re ready. You just prepare the salad, and let it sit in the refrigerator.” She smiled. “I know you have a refrigerator. Then, while that’s chilling, you make the omelet, and you serve them both together. And”—she reached under her makeshift counter—“Prasert’s kanom maprao. Even if everything else is a … even if other things don’t turn out perfectly, this will save any evening.”

Perhaps that was true, under normal circumstances, but this evening was beginning to look like one that not even the best coconut cake in the world could salvage. Ladarat chopped the basil and cucumbers as Duanphen had shown her, then the onions and finally the pork, making a salad that looked rather pretty in a disorganized sort of way. Unsure which was the dressing and which was the dipping sauce for the pork, Ladarat poured both into the mixture in the bowl and stirred it in evenly, more or less.

She had hoped that she could at least begin the omelet before Wiriya arrived. Her heart sank as she heard his car in the driveway. Making an omelet couldn’t possibly be that difficult, could it? Probably it was not. But how was someone supposed to break an egg?

That was something that people—normal people, at least—tried to avoid doing. It wasn’t something a sane person would try to do. Ladarat’s experience in this activity was rather limited. What was the appropriate procedure? One needed a fundamental change of philosophy in order to break an egg, she thought. Ladarat stood uncertainly at the kitchen counter, holding one egg in each hand.

That was how Wiriya found her as he let himself in through the front door and greeted her with a kiss before taking a Singha out of the refrigerator.

He looked at the yam khor moo yang, a little startled, perhaps. His eyebrows went up a fraction of a centimeter, just a little higher on the left than on the right, as was usual for him. Wiriya seemed surprised, but whether that was because of the appearance of this particular batch of yam khor moo yang, or—as Ladarat preferred to believe—the fact that it was here at all, she wasn’t sure.

He looked carefully at the eggs on the counter and approvingly at the bowl and the frying pan that Ladarat had found and cleaned of dust and cobwebs. Finally he looked at the eggs she was holding gingerly in each hand.

“You are contemplating the possibility of breaking eggs?” he guessed.

Ladarat nodded and tried to explain her theory of breaking eggs, that it was something that one tried not to do, so doing it, well, seemed more complicated than perhaps it really was. It was perhaps the stupidest culinary theory that Ladarat had ever heard uttered, but Wiriya seemed to take it in stride. He even nodded.

“I’ve seen our new nurses in the police clinic face the same challenge. They’ve never drawn blood before, and they know that sticking a needle into someone is something that most normal people don’t do. It’s really not that difficult or complicated. But they poke gently, then a little harder. Then too hard.” He paused. “But you know, breaking eggs is not so difficult.”

“It isn’t?”

“Not at all. You just need to use the right amount of force. And if you’re not sure, then first a little bit, and then a little bit more. Here.” Wiriya took one of the eggs that Ladarat had been holding.

He rapped the egg sharply on the edge of the sink, creating a substantial crack all the way around. He handed it to her, and she took it carefully in one hand.

“Two hands. Like you’re peeling a rambutan.”

Ladarat stuck both thumbs into the cracked egg. That analogy had made her forget for a moment that she wasn’t holding a spiny, hard-skinned piece of fruit, but an egg. The shell broke into pieces, and the egg and pieces of the white shell ended up in the bowl. On the bright side, though, she had certainly broken an egg. Patiently, Wiriya helped her fish the pieces of eggshell out with a fork, and he helped her break another egg, and another and another. Then he watched approvingly as she mixed the eggs together and added the Golden Boy sauce.

“Secret ingredient,” she said.

Wiriya could be a patient teacher, but he was on his second Singha, and he was hungry.

“I’ll do this part.” He expertly heated the pan, swirled the eggs around, and in a few minutes created a crispy brown omelet that Duanphen would have been proud of.

A few minutes later, as they were sitting outside in the garden and Ladarat had her own Singha, she thought to ask her boyfriend where he had learned to cook. He laughed.

“I’m a bachelor, remember? We have to learn to fend for ourselves. I decided a while ago that I would learn to cook some simple things. Just so I don’t starve.”

Such as?

“Kao mok gai.”

“Kao mok gai?” That was a baked dish of rice and saffron and chicken, not complicated, but requiring vast patience. Duanphen had warned at their first lesson that it was for advanced chefs. “Too many opportunities to go wrong. Stick to dishes that are simpler at first.”

Wiriya nodded, then shrugged. “Anything is easy with practice,” he said, serving the pork salad and then the omelet from the pan, first to Ladarat, then to himself. He tried the pork salad first, nodding, then grimacing just a little.

“A little spicy, perhaps?”

Ladarat tried some and nodded. “Maybe that’s the chili dipping sauce.”

Wiriya arched an eyebrow, looking around for the dipping sauce.

“I just put it all in the salad,” she explained. “I wasn’t sure which one was the dipping sauce, so. …”

“You added both. Makes sense. Very efficient.”

After they ate for a moment or two in comfortable silence, Ladarat decided that this would be an excellent time to get some advice about the strange case of the Parrot Gang. But she also had to admit that it was nice not having a case to talk about. It was nice not having other people’s problems intruding on their time together.

She sent Richard April on his way to wherever it was he was going, with whomever he’d found to go with. And she left the Parrot Gang to fend for itself. She didn’t even ask what Wiriya’s young, ambitious detectives had discovered in the mysterious case of the sleeping doctor.

Instead they talked about their plans for the weekend, and Ladarat’s upcoming trip to Bangkok, and the value of efficiency in culinary endeavors.