How to Cook an Egg Sunny Side Up

     I've grown very fond of the kitchen here at the Mirador. Besides preparing and eating my breakfast downstairs in the kitchen, the family here also serves my dinner in there. We're quite friendly. The abuela has pointed directly at me and told me I was her amigo. Yesterday, the abuelo Diego came to check out my land and my house in progress. He waved me off from his own hotel saying 'I know where your land is' so I took off at a good clip in order to see what the old guy could do. He's got plenty of years of behind him, not too many teeth, leather sandals, a machete and a sweet palm hat like mine. He stayed with me pretty well. He's mature in years but still Mayan and I really haven't met one yet, male or female, who can't get around any slope without shocking grace and speed. After that we moved on to the real purpose of our trip, picking oranges from their property. The oranges were delicious, I ate about 11 in two days. I'll use the seed from a good one to plant a tree at my place. Hidden behind the real purpose of the trip is the real real purpose of the trip, making sure I know where their properties are, in general, in case I want to buy one or show it to a friend. Despite this genial relationship, I'm never invited into their kitchen, where the fire is, for a meal.

     My breakfast is often a brunch after doing other things. I get overhungry and try to eat a good amount. Sometimes I think it counts for lunch but then around four pm I get starving and realize I'll never make it to dinner so I eat something. Now I just do it that way normally and at 7:15p when dinner is served I'm always good and hungry again.

    There's a breakfast warmup of a hard-boiled egg and a mouthful of trail mix just as I enter the room. This gets me through the prep, which I do fast and crazy so everything is ready at the same time. Mosh is oatmeal and mosh is one my favorite words to say many times throughout the day. I've been having mosh with banana, papaya, zapote, mango, trail mix, coconut, panella and milk powder. That's delicious, it's super instant and the stove boils hot. This paper should've been titled:

Cooking at hot temperature in Guatemala as a result of cheap, light cookware and gas stoves with no low heat capability.

     The mosh needs constant stirring but I fire up the egg pan with the oil. College classes like Material Properties and Heat Transfer made me look at cooking in a new way. This helped me a lot going from Massachusetts to Guatemala and coming into a drastically new cooking style. Back in Northampton, we used an electric stove with burners that cooked low all the way down to room temp. Mostly, we used cast iron pans. Specific heat capacity is heat capacity: how much heat something can hang onto as a function of volume. And this is quantifiable by material and shape. A 12" cast iron pan, by the time it gets nice and hot, holds onto a lot of heat in its bulk, and it's often the pan that cooks the food, not exactly the fire. My eggs are cooked on a thin, light, blue enamel six inch pan. It has a very low heat capacity. I get the oil pretty hot, mysteriously sometimes crackling, and sometimes not, and I keep the fire hot beneath. If you keep a lower fire, your first egg might be fine, but it might suck every bit of heat from the pan, and when your second egg hits, it splashes down onto a much cooler pan, not crackling and bubbling immediately the way it should. Two eggs is ideal, and remember, I've had a warmup egg, so this makes three all told. Watch the eggs and tilt the pan around to redistribute the oil and uncooked egg. When there is the right amount of liquid still visible, kill the heat. I think this is the crux. Leave the eggs on this pan over no heat for the right cure and now you have no rush to get them on the plate. With cast iron, the pan can't help but continue cooking the eggs and your yolk will begin to firm up. If you killed the heat and put them on a plate, the temperature difference of the cooler plate may halt the bit of cooking that you still need to happen. If you just leave them on the cheap pan for a time, the egg whites cook themselves through and the yolk warms up but is completely runny.

     Thinking back, there was a time when I thought 'What is the deal with sunny side up eggs? I'd like to learn how to cook an egg sunny side up.' In fact, I'd like to be proficient at doing an egg every way. But I think I tried a few times and didn't realize how to do it right, and I inadvertently went back to over easy. I happened on it because of the Guatemalan economy and the way it informs their cooking. Will I get cast iron here? I'm not sure. I love it, but cast iron will be more expensive to buy, heavier to carry, and more gas as the stove takes the time to heat it up. Gas is a heavy tank that needs to be taken up the hill, too. Should I do cast iron or custom-made stove with griddle-top for those eggs? These are the challenges I'm facing. I'll have an egg.