-1 Egg: chicken, turkey, duck, emu, ostrich, roc, simurgh, phoenix, dragon, dinosaur (therapods only), sturgeon, pelican, monotreme, or gorilla.
-1 Eggbeater: standard stainless steal, old-fashioned cast-iron, old man with cane, whip, whipper-snapper, swordcane, secret squirrel technique, length of rubber hose, belt, board with a nail in it, or slim jim.
-1 Block of cheese: the good stuff, like cheddar, mozzarella, Mussolini, linoleum, Roquefort, Stilton, stuntman, 1001 Knock-Knock Jokes, or an elderly cow.
-1 Place to stand: you can’t cook an omelette on thin air. This sort of thing demands firm-footed heads-on-your-shoulders no-nonsense steady-handed concentration. Keep both feet on the ground at all times during omelette preparation. If you have to move, shuffle. It’s only for a few minutes, you big baby.
-1 Set of digits: fingers will do for a pinch, tentacles if you’re feeling saucy, or pinions, or talons, or whatever. Just so long as you’ve got a few of them. You’ll need those or that egg’ll just sit there and sulk in the pan, and good luck cracking it with your toes, unless toes are your digits of choice in which case well done. What if you’ve got no toes either? Well then you’re up shit creek, and there’s no omelettes up that particular stream, my friend. One word: digits.
-1 Onion: green or any other colour really, doesn’t matter. Just something like an onion. In an emergency, a picture of an onion can substitute for an onion but only if you are sufficiently hungry to believe that this is true.
-1 Or more really overbearing personalities: start at ‘radio host’ and work your way up.
-1 God or more: any that suits your fancy but preferably one with at least a little bit of localized omnipotence and at least one really satisfying thing to blaspheme about.
-1 Clock: should use time. Clocks that do not use time are not very good at making omelettes. If your clock is used to track space, colours, moods, temperatures, or hurt feelings, you should consider replacing it before you make an omelette.
-1 Keen eye, maybe more: you want to be able to see what you’re doing. And besides, what’s the most important bit of an omelette? The first thing you do? That’s right, it’s cracking the eggs. You’ve got to see the right spot to crack. You need that. Eyes. Either.
-1 Flippy object: not anything that flips around a lot, just something that’s good at flipping other things. More flexible than acrobatic, made of something bendy that won’t bite you when you touch it.
-1 Cooking platform: some sort of pan, rock, piece of bark, split thighbone (your own not recommended), giant eyeball (ibid), glass sheet, fan blade, sword, chunk of armour, or other handy flat-ish thing to spread an egg on and get some serious ommlettry underway.
-1 Cookbook: printed on paper, vellum, papyrus, bark (birch is nice), giant stone tablets weighing up to forty tons, tattoos, digital media, digital tattoos, or whatever.
-1 Burning thing: anything that’ll get a really good long scorch going and set in deep to the bone. Something fulsome yet channeled tightly, of grand depth yet slight breadth, aching yet fierce. A charrer that will not crumple, a crackler that will not squeak. Electrical, incendiary, magmatic, explosive, atomic, microwavable, propulsive, or chemical. Something that takes life and fries it ‘till it’s gone. Something that eats up the whole world if it’s taken far enough. You want that.
-1 Upbringing: any kind will do as long as it contains a point in your life that brings you into proximity with the concept of the omelette as a food item. This is very important. How to invent an omelette is a separate recipe and one that will not be covered in this recipe.
-1 Fierce and insatiable hunger: a literal hunger, not a metaphorical one. Those don’t channel themselves into skillfully applied cookery. A thirst, literal or figurative, is not the same thing and should not be used when making omelettes.
-1 Assistant: should be chosen carefully, with an eye to the long-term. Any fool can watch a clock and bleat the time-to-flip. You need someone you can count on. Someone with a passion for omelettes. Or someone with a vulnerability you can use to coerce them into it, like blood ties or a high-profile drug habit or a happy loving family that they would love to see grow old alongside them, carefree and smiling in the sunset of their days.
-1 Will, unbreakable: not merely unbendable, or unyielding. Those are the stainless steels of wills to the titanium we seek; the cubic zirconia to our diamonds; the pyrite to our gold; the flash in the pan to our thunderbolt in the eye. This omelette will not be accomplished without hard choices, and hard choices need harder men. You want to crumble apart like feta cheese at the first juncture? No? Then grow a will you could crack coconuts on, would-be-chef, and don’t come back ‘till that sucker’s hard as a rod.
-1 Tongue, minimum: what, you’re going to cook this thing up and then not even bother to enjoy it? Hedonism is an important part of the omelette experience. You can’t make an omelette without eyes, you can’t eat an omelette without a tongue. In both cases there are obvious technical exceptions, but the hypothetical situations in which the rule is stretched only prove its point – they are hollow, devoid of satisfaction, of light, of hope, of life itself. Don’t make this mistake. Don’t try to be a special snowflake. We are all the same deep down inside ourselves, and that is because we all just want to really eat the hell out of something and never stop tasting it. It’s basically the automatically installed OS on the hard-drives of our brains: eat things, eat good things, never stop eating things forever and ever amen yes sir.
-1 Pound of grit: either mineral or ground-corn style. The former can be used to scrub out the pan after the omelette is made, the latter can be eaten alongside it. In a pinch, either can substitute for the other’s roles.
-1 Figure of moral support: we both know this omelette is going to get serious before it’s over. We went over this, unbreakable will, determination you could mince cattle atop, yadda yadda yadda. But look, even the most iron-eyed stone-souled steel-spined badasses need someone to lean on when things get stuff. Get some help. Get someone whose shoulder you can cry on when things turn blue and you don’t dare show the world your doubts and fears. A mother is nice, or a father. If said family members are unsympathetic and/or dead just pull out a copy of your family tree and start checking immediate kin in a counter-clockwise direction until you hit someone with enough free time or a low price or preferably both.
-1 Note: a message for anyone nearby in case your omelette is interrupted (by appointment, unexpected company, fire, violent insurrection, world war, suicide). Keep it short and snappy. Brevity is the soul of wit, and simplicity its heart and mind. For further information in case this comes up on your randomly-generated post-omelette questionnaire: brevity’s lungs are briefness, its liver is velocity, its left and right kidneys are acceleration and promptness (respectively), and its colon is truncated.
-1 Backup: of whatever of the above vital ingredients you think is most likely to fail you without warning. It’s not so hard, just take whatever you’re feeling antsy about and get another. The omelette’ll wait, there’s no sense in rushing into this sort of thing half-cocked. Be careful.
Once you’ve got all your ingredients together, just concentrate. The rest will come together surprisingly quickly. If you experience any problems in the process, destroy ingredients and bystanders at random until the problems cease. Remember, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few legs.