To that end, here are a few culinary successes over the past week.
Okay, maybe this isn’t impressive to you, but I have an ongoing battle with hard boiled eggs. My criteria for perfection is that they are easy to peel without any of the white having to be pocked by fingernails and the yolk must not have any gray in it. I don't even demand that the yolk remain perfectly centered in the largest part of the oval -- only that they don't resemble spackle.
In spite of following all the myriad of “fool proof” tips for the perfect hard boiled egg, I have never achieved the goal of all the eggs in the batch I’m making turning out perfect. I may get one perfect one, but the rest will have that gray coating around the yolk; or the entire white will split; or the shell will come off in little tiny splinters.
But behold! Eggy perfection with which to torture Heir 2, who absolutely hates hard boiled eggs.
This was part of our Tuesday dinner salad, since I refuse to turn on air conditioning until
the last two weeks in July and I didn’t want to heat up the whole house.
The other minor triumph was actually a mistake that turned out well.
Oatmeal banana blueberry muffins. No sugar. Not on purpose, mind you. I simply forgot because I was making lemonade at the same time and put the sugar destined for the muffins in the lemonade and then forgot about the muffin batter. Still, two dozen muffins didn’t last 24 hours, so it couldn’t have been that bad.
Just one more thing:
7 comments:
I have a push pin I keep in the silverware drawer. (Yeah, like I have silver! Hah!) When I boil eggs I carefully poke a hole in the fat end of the egg. This allows the sulphur in the egg, which colors the yolk greenish-gray, to escape while boiling. Helps the flavor, too. It also allows water to enter the shell and makes the removal of the shell a lot easier.
I HATE eggshells that won't come off the egg! I don't really care about the color of the yolk, but I saw that pin bit on a cooking show once and tried it. It worked pretty well.
My Grandpop's method to make the shells slide off easier was to crack the cooled egg, peel off a bit on one end, then blow into the shell. Same idea, I guess: put moisture around the egg inside the shell.
By the way ... fresh eggs are harder to peel than older eggs. Just so you remember! LOL
Wow... no black n' blue middle by the yellow! Awsome!
The muffin-man is getting skin cell and hair debris on the muffins.
I too dislike the whole egg-peeling thing. Can't get it down. I love hard boiled eggs though.
How did you keep it from discoloring at the borderline? I've tried some of the handy tips. They didn't work.
benning: Okay. These are new tips I'll have to try. So it's the sulpher, huh?
DG: All those muffins were his muffins. He dragged them into his cage and were never seen again.
Don't know what I did to deserve the perfect eggs. Like I said, I can usually get one, but all of them came out perfect.
I always thought it was overcooking the eggs that caused the gray/green crud. Benning says its the sulfur. Maybe it's both. All I know is I started out with cold water in that cephalon sauce pot I have, brought it to a boil (with the lid on because the cephalon takes too long to come to a boil otherwise), once it was at a rolling boil, pulled it off the burner and set the time for 12 min. At 12 min., I dumped the hot water and ran it under cold for a good, long time.
If it works again, I'll deem it a "system." Until that time, I'm treating it as a fluke.
Am I too old to be adopted?
Because I would APPRECIATE all the cooking and wouldn't gripe AT ALL about grey on eggs if you would just let me have the salads and muffins and such. And lemonade! And dogs!
Sigh. Your family is so lucky.
I knew it was the sulfer. I can't see the poking a pin thing. Wouldn't you then have, like, some stringy trail of eggy-goo turning into stuff that looks like egg drop soup then? ... or like, the eggs will look like a really fat fish with a trail of poo bobbing around in the water.
So you had the eggs in from the get-go, or you added them after the water boiled and you took pot off burner?
Trasherati: Sure! We'll adopt you! You'll just have to share the basement with Heir 1 and his troll friends... Oh, and learn to eat fast. It all goes very quickly.
DG: According to Dirtman (he of the poultry degree) the piercing of the large end of the egg apparently breaks some sort of gas pocket in the egg and for some reason this means it won't seep out. I've heard about using this method to prevent cracking, but it has to be a really, really thin pin.
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