“MEAT and fish! Meat and fish! Meat and fish! God, how boring!” We tend to complain, as though it were somebody else's fault. Yet we constantly reoffend, it seems. We’re not actually obliged to eat just meat and fish. We have many other alternatives – eggs, for example.

Fried eggs, poached eggs, hard-boiled eggs, scrambled eggs – and tortilla, the amazing Spanish tortilla.

Have you ever stopped to think about how many tortillas exist in the world, let alone in Spain? We have more tortillas than you have enjoyed or suffered relationships...

If I log onto the internet, I would never have imagined that putting the word tortilla in the search engine would give so many results.

Let’s not get confused with Mexican tortilla – Spanish tortillas are a different class altogether and their varieties are legion.

Baked tortilla, tortilla campera, tortilla with wild mushrooms, with button mushrooms, with acelgas (Swiss chard), with garlic, made of béchamel with sausage, with aubergine, with courgette, with fideos (noodles cut into one-inch pieces), with gulas (elvers, or young eels no thicker than spaghetti), with cooked breakfast sausage, with cheese, with sobrasada (spicy sausage), stuffed, vegetarian, Murcian-style, country-style, with turnip-tops...and I've stopped there because I don’t want you to think that I’m writing (and been paid to write) an article by copying this monumental search result find – and in fact I’ve only given a small sample of what is out there.

The tortilla, like bread or rice, is one of those staple foodstuffs that serve as a base to accompany others, impregnating them with their taste. Here resides the uncommon variety that can be created with just a few beaten eggs.

Yet cooking is an imperial practice and is open to any new ideas. Precisely for that reason, what is satisfactory is accepted and what isn’t, is rejected.

Tortillas made with seafood, for example – with oysters, mussels and prawns – have not been very successful; in fact, they’ve bombed spectacularly, because these three ingredients do not gain anything in taste if we add beaten eggs to them.

On the other hand, a perfect partnership and a tortilla not to be missed can be made up of other ingredients that I have not added to the list – onions, cauliflower, artichokes, tender young garlic, broad beans, wild asparagus spears...and potatoes, of course.

Potato tortilla is delicious, but requires a skilled hand, a careful balance of eggs and potatoes (sometimes people skimp on eggs, with pitiful results) and what all tortillas demand – to be cooked for a few minutes before eating them, not to leave them to dry out in the glass case at the bar.

But if they are done properly, potato tortilla deserves to be the main course in any lunch menu; although we know that in many parts of Spain tortillas are often served for elevenses or even as a snack in the evening with a glass of Martini.

With all types of tortilla, but especially potato ones, we should ask ourselves – as with meat – at what stage of cooking they should be eaten: rare, well-done or cooked to a crisp.

There is no accounting for tastes but at the end of the day everyone has their own. In the case of potato tortilla they are usually served up slightly underdone, sweet and soft, but not so that the egg is still running on the inside. As for the amount of fat used to make tortillas, there is no need for doubt – in a large part of France and other countries they use butter, but here animal fat is substituted with vegetable fat – that is, virgin olive oil. And wherever you go in the world, it is always worth eating what the other inhabitants eat.

Meat and fish? Not necessarily. Make yourselves a tasty tortilla and you will find a solution to culinary monotony – but don’t rule out this dish just because it is easy and simple to put together. Take it slowly and calmly when you make it, since there is a world of difference between a well-made tortilla and a badly-made one.

Plenty of calm, since although it is not exactly a matter of life or death it is indeed a matter of taste or lack of – which, in terms of quality of life, is very much the same.

A foolproof recipe for a classic Tortilla de Patatas

Ingredients:
9 eggs,
2 onions
5 potatoes.

Method:
Peel the potatoes and the onions and cut them into chunks. Put the oil on to heat for about three minutes until hot enough. Mix the potato with the onion and season. Add both potatoes and onion to the oil and cook for approximately twelve minutes. Drain and put them into the whisked eggs. Never add any salt to the egg mixture. After mixing them, put a little oil in the frying pan and add the mixture. Once it solidifies, toss the omelette to cook both sides.