Bins opens the freezer and immediately does a double take. “What’s THIS?” he wants to know. But I’m not looking in his direction so I don’t know what he’s looking at. “The EGG,” he says. “There’s an EGG in the freezer! What’s it doing here? How did it get inside?”
“It must be that frozen chicken I put in there three months ago,” I say breezily. “It grew tired of being ignored and decided to lay an egg!” “Not likely,” says Bins, perfectly straight-faced, “because it was only chicken legs.” “All right,” I say, sighing. “I confess. I put the egg in the freezer. Now can we just let it go?”
Needless to say, that approach fails miserably. “You put a raw egg in the freezer!” exclaims Bins. “And you think I will just nod my head and say quietly to myself, ‘She has gone mad. How sad. Too bad!’ You know I will not! So shall I get out my thumbscrews or will you just tell me and stop wasting all our times?”
“Okay,” I say. “It’s something I saw on Facebook. A new way of cooking an egg.” “IN THE FREEZER?” screams Bins, his pale grey eyebrows leaping up to merge with his thinning hairline. “Shall I call the asylum right away or only after you’ve eaten one raw cold egg?” I click my tongue. “Look!” I say, “stop getting all excited. It’ll be fried just like any other egg except ... except ...” I shrug. “I’ll just have to show you or it won’t make any sense.”
Naturally, nothing is ever as simple as it looks in a YouTube video. For instance, the egg, that had spent one whole night in the freezer, is now rock-solid with a crack the shape of the San Andreas Fault running down its side. Inside the crack we can see the pale yellow-grey albumen. It looks like unpolished agate and is just as hard. The shell is stuck tight. I tap it with a spoon and even throw it into the sink a couple of times, but it remains obstinately undamaged. “Shall I get a hammer and chisel?” asked Bins, helpfully. “Or maybe a blowtorch?”
Ultimately I leave it in the fridge to thaw out. After all, once it’s back to normal I should be able to just pour it out and scramble it. But half an hour later, the albumen has softened. So I peel the egg, still quite solid, until it’s naked and shivering on my chopping board. Using a sharp knife, I slice it up, while melting a pat of butter in the frying pan. By the time I’ve got five slices of semi-frozen egg, the butter has melted. Using a flexible little spatula, I carefully transfer the slices to the frying pan.
A few minutes later, five miniature fried eggs smile up at me from the pan! “Frozen fiesta!” I say, feeling totally thrilled. Bins wanders away, groaning softly, while I gobble up my tiny feast.
Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column