Boiling


 * Boiling**

My first recipe for cooking class:eggs. Nothing fancy, just hard boiled eggs. It sounds easy enough, why would I even include hard boiled eggs in my syllabus? Because hard boiled eggs are my nemisis. We have chickens so I've watched my mom boil eggs a gazillion times, but I'd never made them myself until this summer. We were having book club at my house. The book was //Wuthering Heights// and the theme was high tea. (Which is like, the only decent foodstuff the English came up with. I mean really, bubble and squeak, kidney pie, steamed puddings and Catherine's favorite food: //gruel//.)

So anyways, I volunteered to make finger sandwiches because, with my book club, if I didn't make something that vaugely resembled dinner, we would be eating five different types of sweets. So I boiled chicken breasts for chicken salad and cut up tomatoes and cucumbers for bruscetta and cucumber/ cream chesse sandwiches, respectively.

I pulled down the cookbook mom always pulls down when she boils eggs and I opened it open to the page she always looks at when she boils eggs. The recipe was from a newspaper clipping and it sounded fairly straight forward. Bring a pot of salted water to a rolling boil, gently lower the eggs into the water, bring the water back down to a simmer, simmer thirty seconds, turn off the heat, let the eggs sit in the hot water for twenty minutes, run the eggs under cold water untill cool, then chill or eat or whatever. So I followed the directions to a T and put the eggs in the fridge when I was done, thinking I would make the egg salad the next day.

Well, the next day I pulled the eggs out of the fridge and started peeling them. But the white stuck completely to the shell and the yolk was still liquidy. So I called my mom and she said she cooked them for two minutes and then let them sit twenty minutes. So I tried again. I brought the pot of salted water to a rolling boil, lowered the eggs into the water, brought the water down to a simmer, simmered the eggs for two minutes, and let them sit for twenty minutes. Since I was pinched for time, I didn't chill the eggs, I just started to peel the eggs, but again liquid-y yolk. So I called my mom again, this time nearly in tears. She asked me to tell her exactly what I did, so I read her recipe aloud to her over the phone, remembering to change thirty seconds to two minutes. And she goes, "Oh, I never turn the eggs down to a simmer."

//Thanks mom!// Why can't she just write down her recipies like a normal person? So I started to make egg salad, but we were out of Miracle Whip and I had to make the egg salad with mayonaisse, so it tasted funny. And no one but my dad would eat the egg salad finger sandwiches. Which is truly depressing because he will eat anything, like even dog food.

So after the disasterous book club egg salad, I decided I had to learn how to make hard boiled eggs and egg salad because one cannot call oneself a chef and then say "But I don't cook eggs." Which brings me to my first recipe for cooking class. I have this nifty book called //James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking// which will be my "textbook." It's divided into sections based on technique and I've chosen a few recipies I want to try from each section. So the first section is Boiling and the first recipe I chose is hard boiled eggs. And James Beard is not out to confuse me or sabatoge my book club meeting like my mother is, so his recipe for hard boiled eggs is short and sweet. Boil for three minutes and let sit in hot water for nine minutes. But I forgot to bring my textbook home. So I boiled them for eight minutes and took them out of the water. Because I heard it somewhere... I know bad student, but I heard it somewhere (I think from my chef/ senior project mentor guy) and it worked and my egg yolks weren't runny, so I am a happy chef-in-training (even though I still don't like egg salad.)


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