Each week, my Meal of the Week feature examines an airline meal from my travels over the years. This may be a meal from earlier in the week or it may be a meal served over a decade ago.
Would you eat an airline egg dish if you didn’t know what it was? I did on Ukraine International Airlines and I didn’t regret it…even when I discovered it wasn’t actually eggs I was eating…or maybe it was?
It was about three years ago and I was traveling from Istanbul to Kiev. The flight departed early in the morning and breakfast was served after takeoff.
No menu was offered, but a flight attendant took breakfast orders immediately after takeoff. The choices were eggs, specifically a plan omelette, or cheese blintzes. I ordered the omelette.
Now keep in mind, I had just flown from Los Angeles to London to Cairo to Beirut to Istanbul without a break, so I was rather sleepy by this time.
The tray arrived. It included bircher muesli, sliced melon and grapes, a croissant, and the “omelette”…
I looked at the dish and thought, that’s a strange-looking omelet. It doesn’t even look like eggs.
Clearly the fatigue was at work because it simply did not dawn on me that these were a thin crepe-like pancake filled with cheese…a blintz; the other choice. Ot maybe it was eggs? I still don’t know.
The cheese was mild, the pancake egg-like, and I finished the dish having thought I had eaten weird eggs. Even the bitter taste of the powdered coffee did not help me discern the taste.
CONLCUSION
I wrote the trip report immediately and even then it did not dawn on me that I may have eaten blintzes, not eggs. Now I’m just confused. What do you think it was?
You can read my full trip report here.
I think it actually was omelette. It looks very much like omelette I had recently on Aeroflot.
Could be. Who knows. But three years later, it looks like a blintz to me. It was bland.
I think Mishas might be right. It looks like a poorly executed version of a Ukrainian omelette. Like what you’d get when using powdered instead of fresh eggs. (Yes, I really did just spend the last 20 minutes looking this up. What can I say. I’m a food nerd.)
https://ukrainian-recipes.com/ukrainian-omelette.html
The crepe just seems too thin to be a blintz to me.
So possibly both you and the FA didn’t notice you might have been served the wrong dish.
I love how “jam” is approximately the same word in Ukrainian/Russian as in English: джем transliterates to dzhyem, pronounced almost the same as in English (albeit more like gem than jam).
As Ukrainian, I can prove that this was actually an omelette. My grandma cooked it the same way 😉 it contains eggs, milk, some flour and is baked in the oven.
The other dish would look like pancakes 😉