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I mean, they call them DEVILED eggs?

4 Jul

I’m not an egg eater. I usually keep a dozen in my fridge as a pantry item, the same way I stock flour, sugar, olive oil and rice.

But do I eat eggs? RARELY. And usually only as a “binder” in a recipe where I wouldn’t overtly realize there were eggs at play. This often confuses people, so a few examples:

  • Baked goods like cake/pies/biscuits where they are mixed in and unrecognizable (YES)
  • Spaghetti carbonara (NO)
  • Breakfast scramble with potatoes, bacon, onions and cheese as the stars? (MAYBE – depends how many eggs you use and how long you cook them)
  • Scrambled eggs (NO)
  • Quiche (MAYBE – but only if I make it, can confirm the eggs are very firm and see that the ratio of other ingredients will vastly overpower the eggs)
  • Fresh Aioli (MAYBE – depends how good a chef you are, what herbs are involved and how fresh the eggs are)
  • Egg Salad (HELL NO)
  • Huevos Rancheros (NOPE)
  • Deviled Eggs (Not happening)
  • French Toast (Possibly – but only if it’s as hard as a brick because the eggs basically evaporated out of it)

Are we clear on where my line is? Good.

I clarify all of this because my one WEIRD exception is that I make a wilted spinach salad (my southern mom’s recipe) and uncharacteristically slice a hard boiled egg into it. (To be fair, I only use the white and toss the yolk.)

AN ODD ASIDE: I insist on pronouncing the “L” in “yolk.” It drives Alan bananas. “YOLLLLK?” he asks. “It’s YOKE.”

“No,” I tell him, “That’s how you hitch a donkey to a cart – you YOKE it.”

“OK,” he counters, “But square this with the fact that you go to a ‘FOKE’ Festival and wear ‘POKE-a’ dots.”

I look at him cooly. “I don’t. I go to a folllllllk festival and wear pollllllka dots and my parents (whom I call my follllks) are there witih me to dance the pollllllka while we conscientiously avoid eating any egg yolllllks.”

He always loses his shit right around here, and I’m not even trying to get a rise out of him. This is how I actually pronounce these words. I think it might just be a midwestern thing?

Anyway, the point of this post was to tell you about a far more interesting (in my opinion) exchange with my parents, in which I asked them for advice on how to make it easier to peel a boiled egg. (Because yes, I was making my mom’s wilted salad.)

“Well,” they told me, with confidence, “The fresher the egg, the harder it is to peel.”

“Disagree,” I rebutted with confidence. “Because the eggs I just boiled have been in my fridge since February and it is now July. And they are IMPOSSIBLE to peel.”

Long pause.

“What? February? No way. Really?” their voices overlapped in incredulity.

“Sure,” I explained. “During the pandemic when I wasn’t entertaining, I realized I had eggs a lot longer, so I got in the habit of cracking one before cooking them to make sure they were still fine, and they basically last forever in the fridge.”

I could tell my parents still had their doubts. “I mean, I’m pretty comfortable stretching out expiration dates,” my mom said, “But five months on eggs? No way.”

This prompted me to find a real rule (rather than just my Sniff Test) and I came up with this, from Southern Living:

“If the eggs sink to the bottom and lay flat on their side, they’re still fresh. However, if they sink, but stand on one end at the bottom of the glass or bowl, they’re not as fresh but still edible. Of course, if any eggs float to the top, they shouldn’t be eaten.”

I’m here to tell you that when I placed these eggs in the pot to boil them, they stood up but didn’t float. I feel vindicated.

I feel it’s important to note: I’d never attempt this if I were making the food for another person. I might be a bit cavalier about expiration dates when it comes to my own health, but I pride myself on being a good host, so the last thing I’d want to do is give someone food poisoning. (This reminds me of the time my friend Betsy and I made mussels for our birthday celebration – I probably spent an hour checking out each individual mussel to make sure it was still alive before she came over.)

Here we are on the Fourth of July. Before you get judgmental about my egg-boiling habit, I’d like you to take a long hard look at that egg you’re holding at your backyard picnic and ask yourself: how long has this been out of the refrigerator? Do I really know? Because that, my friend, is why those eggs are considered deviled.

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It’s time to NOT talk turkey!

28 Nov

Screen Shot 2019-11-28 at 5.39.42 AM

My friend Marcy texted this to me. She knows I hate the word moist.

For the first time in ages (maybe ever?), it’s just Alan and me for Thanksgiving this year, and I have to say, while I usually enjoy holidays being about family, this year it feels wonderful to just take a time out for the two of us. We’ve both had hectic falls, and between my work trip to LA and his two weeks in Michigan hunting, we barely saw each other this month.

So how do we plan to celebrate since we’re not tethered to others’ expectations? Well, for starters, we haven’t even asked ourselves the question that most people probably discussed ad nauseam yesterday: what time will we eat? Because the answer (whenever we feel hungry) doesn’t really matter when you’re only coordinating two people.

Also? We’ve totally scrapped the traditional menu. I’m not a big fan of turkey, and while I enjoy the side dishes (specifically: mashed potatoes, green beans, brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes), I make them all regularly, so they don’t feel like a special treat to get all excited about. Fortunately, Alan’s easy-going and also a bit of a foodie, so he was totally game for a menu overhaul.

Here’s what we landed on: whole roasted branzini, lemon risotto, and a shaved brussel sprout salad. I’ve never roasted a whole fish with its head on before, and Alan’s never made proper risotto from scratch, so today’s focus on food is more on experimentation than it is on eating. (Which is probably a good thing, since we might end up ordering a pizza if our experiments go sideways.)

[Ethical side note: when people say they don’t eat anything that had a mother, does fish count? To my knowledge, they just lay eggs and abandon them, so I’m including them in my guilt-free column because I’m judgmental and that’s not very maternal.]

Food aside, the other benefit of it being just US: we can stay in our pajamas all day. No dressing up and making ourselves presentable. No posing for family photos. Just us in pjs with Miss Moneypenny and a fire. And since I’m a nerd, we’ll be working on the second installment of “Hunt a Killer” (a monthly mystery box) at some point during the day, because nothing says “Happy Thanksgiving” like discussing crime and naming the criminal.

I guess in that sense – talking about criminals – our holiday won’t be that different from most Americans this year. We just won’t be arguing about it.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

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At least I can’t taste the eggs.

14 Jan

I might be the only American alive who hates eggs. Can’t stand them. The concept. The texture. The taste. The smell.

In fact, want to watch me go berserk? Microwave an egg near me. Gah!

So you might therefore find it a bit surprising to learn that I made a quiche on Sunday. I have a recipe for a bacon leek quiche that uses only 2.5 eggs and about a pound of gruyere, so the egg is really more of a binder than the main star, thus making it tolerable. Also, I double the bacon (science be damned!) so it basically becomes a bacon gruyere vehicle.

The catalyst for the quiche was two things: I had thawed a pound of bacon and realized I didn’t have any firm plans for using it (other than just sitting around and gorging myself on it), and the leeks at the farmers market looked amazing this weekend.

(Alan might have disagreed – I made him take a long whiff of them on our walk home, thinking he’d appreciate the fresh earthy smell. “Gross,” he declared. “What? Gross? They smell like green onions,” I told him. “More like green onions and FEET,” he corrected me.)

 

Undeterred, I transformed them into a quiche. My recipe actually yields two quiches, but I knew there was no way I’d eat two, so I halved everything, thinking I’d cook all the leeks, then reserve half of them in the freezer to add the next time I made broth. Only I forgot that was my plan and ended up adding ALL of them to the quiche. So it was a bacon, double-leek quiche.

Even so, I thought it tasted delicious – mainly because I couldn’t taste any eggs. When I served it up to Alan for dinner, I didn’t tell him I’d accidentally doubled the leeks. He took a bite. “Very. Um. Oniony,” he declared.

I waited, seeing if that would be considered a good thing. “Delicious,” he finally concluded. “It’s just not every day that bacon is overpowered by something else.” Agreed.

But it could’ve been worse – he could’ve said it tasted like feet.

Smells like feet.

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Eat to live or live to eat?

18 Oct

Image Source: © 2014 pithypants

We all learned a lot about each other’s eating preferences on our trip to Italy. If I had to summarize, here are our dietary tenets…

Mom:

  1. It’s not breakfast unless it involves orange juice and milk.
  2. Every table should include a salt shaker.
  3. There is such a thing as “too much” marinara sauce.
  4. Meat makes it a meal.

Me:

  1. Live to eat.
  2. Salami is like a blood-sugar insurance policy – one slice at every meal keeps things ticking.
  3. There’s no such thing as too much pasta.
  4. If a restaurant has bruschetta, we’re ordering it.

Alicia:

  1. Eat to live.
  2. Black tea, hold the sugar – hot/cold throughout the day.
  3. Have yogurt, will travel.
  4. Coronettos whenever possible.

Further demonstrating how differently we approach food, shortly after returning, my sister shared this link for Soylent. I encourage you to check out the page and see if anything about the concept appeals to you. (Soylent is a food replacement product that provides nutrients via a powder that mixes into a drink.)

The stated benefits are:

  • Time: Prepare multiple meals in minutes – no need to shop for individual ingredients or plan ahead
  • Money: Spend less than $10 per day on food, and less than $4 per meal – get more than a day’s worth of meals for less than the cost of takeout
  • Nutrition: Eat balanced and wholesome – get all of the essential nutrients required to fuel the human body

Sorry. This guy’s value proposition falls apart for me with the first bullet – I enjoy taking time to shop for ingredients and cook dinner. And more important than money or nutrition to me is TASTE. It might be wrong, but I eat for enjoyment, not nutrition. My sister on the other hand…

Granted, all you need to do is look at us to see how our eating philosophies have shaped our bodies. She’s an easy size 4, and I could definitely stand to lose a pound or, um, fifteen. Details.

Finally – because I’m mildly obsessed with Soylent and the fact that this guy thinks enough people are wired like my sister that there’s a market for this product – can we discuss the name? Is it a terrible or brilliant marketing move to name his product after the 1973 sci-fi movie Soylent Green, which is summarized by Wikipedia as “…the investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and all-year humidity due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green.”

I mean, the plot does seem to be playing out in real life, so I can see where Soylent’s founder drew a connection. The problem, however, is that at the end of the film, you discover that “soylent green” is actually PEOPLE. So here’s guy in 2014, selling an unrecognizable nutritional powder and he’s deliberately named it something that calls to mind cannibalism. Interesting brand strategy.

Which camp are you in? Love to eat or eat for fuel?

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Chicken Three Ways

25 Mar

A threesome of chickens.

A threesome of chickens.

Wait. Before you think I’m dramatically changing the focus on this blog and have a sexual interest in poultry, let me explain…

Tonight I’m giving thanks for having some culinary skills. I think my life would be infinitely less rich if I didn’t know how to cook. I may not have won Top Chef (yet!), but I do know my way around a kitchen. I routinely surprise myself with the meals I can construct on the fly with random ingredients in my fridge.

The meal that prompted my most recent pat on the back was this: A chicken roasted from scratch (thank you, 40×40!) served with the most amazing roasted asparagus… then plucked and used to construct… white bean and sausage cassoulet… and garlic penne with chicken and asparagus. A week of meals, all created in less than an hour (if you ignore the hands-off cooking time).

Friends who are intimidated by the kitchen often ask how I learned. Here’s my answer: I had a good role model. My mom didn’t teach me to cook – or instruct me on specific recipes – but she has modeled a few things for me:

  1. Be curious. She often flips through cookbooks or magazines and earmarks pages for things she wants to try. She doesn’t always make them, but they add to her knowledge base.
  2. Don’t be intimidated. Cooking isn’t exactly a mystery when you’re driving off a recipe. Someone else is giving you explicit instructions – so as long as you can read and follow directions, you can basically cook anything. This might explain why – after being impressed by Chicken Divan at a “Brunch with Bach” (the gold standard for our community’s quarterly cultural events) – my Mom found a recipe and tried her hand at it. It rocked.
  3. Improvise. I don’t think I can open any of my mom’s cookbooks without finding recipes that include her handwritten notes of modifications she’s made – either based on what she had on hand, or the family’s preferences. I think her experimental notes would earn an approving nod from scientists.
  4. Take risks. I can’t remember the specific risks my mom took, but I DO remember the occasional meal hurled straight into our compost bucket – which tells me she was pushing her limit. It also makes me realize I’m doing something right when I spend four hours trying to create crunchy spiced nuts and then end up having to write-off an $8 bag of walnuts because it’s all stuck to my wooden spoon.
  5. Pay attention. You’ll start to realize what works well together – and develop your own library of what to combine when you need to add a pinch of something to get the flavor just right. This makes you confident and nimble – and able to create your own recipes.
  6. Love food. If you enjoy eating, cooking isn’t a chore – it’s an adventure.

So that’s my gratitude for the day – knowing how to cook, and having had a great role model to inspire me. Thanks, Mom!

Now if you’re interested in the most amazing asparagus ever, comment and I’ll share it. Warning: It involves a wee bit copious amounts of bacon butter.

Image Source: http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/35dv15

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