I could have just said “One of those mornings”…
“- When was the first time you lost a fried egg in a sink?
- Oh, let me see, it happened rather late in my life, I must have been over forty, I think I was forty-one at the time.
- Do you remember how it happened?
- I sure do. I took a pile of plates to distribute the eggs on them straight from the pan, but couldn’t find them. Later, it turned out they were right behind my back. But obviously, I couldn’t have known it then.
- And?
- And there I was with a fried egg on a spatula, it was a rather smallish, narrow, spatula, and the plates were in a cupboard on the other side of the kitchen, and —
- That’s the same spatula that is now put on display in “The Egg Tossers International” HQ in Singapore?
- The very same one!
- Back to your story, so there were you, having a seemingly mundane problem in front of you, and you, what, you thought out of the box?
- Well, it’s hard for me to say what I thought or if I was indeed thinking at all, some of the finest decisions we make come actually without thinking — that’s what we’d call a stroke of genius, I guess — so suddenly I found myself inching through the kitchen, a fried egg on the spatula, eyes fixed on the cupboard with plates, and —
- And that’s when it happened!
- Right! So, when I have fortuitously reached the cupboard, I started lifting the hand with the spatula, and the egg perched on top of it, I started lifting it towards the cupboard, instead of just lowering one plate. And the egg just kind of slipped down, and I watched it fall into the kitchen sink, in a kind of slow motion and I just … I just couldn’t believe my eyes.
- And then you cried ‘Eureka’?
- No, actually, I swore, in my native Serbian, for quite a bit (laughs). It’s a very expressive language, swearing-wise (more laughter).
- It’s hard to believe it now, after millions of followers and the, well, the Copernican change of the perspective on how we see the world! Was it the first time you lost food in an inconvenient place? Or, rather, what we used to call ‘an inconvenient place’?
- Well, I once tossed a pancake behind the stove, but I didn’t see it, I didn’t see the potential, I was only seventeen back then.
- But after the egg incident, you, eh, saw the light, you realized that it was your call?
- Well, I could see some possibilities, but not the full size of it, now, I mean, I started with eggs only, dropping them into the sink for a long while, before I tossed one behind the stove — that must have been some reminiscence of my early experiments with the pancake tossing — and soon I was tossing, dropping, throwing. and flinging not only fried eggs, but also boiled, hard and soft, and also fresh. And then, one day, after weeks of experimenting with eggs, I thought ‘Why only eggs? Why not pancakes, buns, waffles, muffins, lapper — that’s a blini-like Norwegian pancake — and, yes, blinis?’
- And then it took off?
- Yes, that opened for the endless possibilities, and many others have sensed it too. I’m happy to have inspired millions to embrace their ‘clumsiness’ and ‘lack of practical thinking’ (laughs), how these expressions sound silly now, and to start taking pride in who they really are: The Egg Tossers.”
(From our exclusive interview with Sri Gordana I. H. Pandit, the global leader of “The Egg Tossers International”, on the occasion of her latest bestseller “Toss the Salad, Toss the Eggs!”)
