COOKING SKILLS
I live in Florida and it was late April, meaning my “snowbird” friends would be heading back to the North Country. Before they leave, they often pack up their left-over groceries and deliver them to me as they head out of town. Well, amongst the things they had left over were two dozen eggs and they dropped them off at my house as they headed out on the road.
As it happened, I had shopped for groceries just the day before their departure and guess what, I had bought a dozen eggs. Mind you, I’m single and I eat out nearly as often as I eat at home and if I’m not eating out, quite often my sweetie would invite me up to her place. With that in mind, just how long do you suppose it takes me to go through a dozen eggs? Two dozen? Three dozen? Hell, I’ll still be eating these eggs come Christmas.
I don’t know if boiling eggs is considered cooking, but for the purposes of this little romp through the recipe book, let’s say it is. I’d been living alone for most of the past 25 years and you’d think that I’d have developed some cooking skills in all that time, wouldn’t you? NOT!!!! Oh, I do cook from time to time, if it can be done in the microwave or the toaster oven. My specialty is the crock pot. I can soup the hell out of you in a crock pot and I make a mean pot of chili, but when it actually comes to cooking, I’m pretty much in the dark.
So, to avoid rotten eggs from having so many of them, I decided to boil up a dozen of them. I know how to boil water, and I figured that boiling eggs couldn’t be much harder. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve ever boiled eggs, you know. I’ve done it on at least two other occasions. Now, I have to tell you that when they talk about a 3-minute egg, I don’t think they were talking about boiling them. That first try didn’t work out so pretty good. They were a little runny. I wound up pitching them out.
But, I’m a fairly quick learner. The next time I boiled them for about 20 minutes, then, just to be safe, I let them set in the hot water until it cooled. That time, I might have over cooked them a little bit. As I recall, some of them cracked while they were still in the pan of water. So, this time, just in case there was some little trick to it that I hadn’t learned yet, I called Sweetie and asked her just how long I should boil them. “It’s quite simple,” she says, “you simply leave the burner on until it starts to boil, then turn it off and let them set for 15 minutes. Gosh almighty, my mom didn’t raise any idiots. I pretty sure that I can handle that.
This seemed like a fairly simple system. So, for the first dozen eggs, I turned on the burner and let it get hot while I ran the water in the kitchen sink until it got hot. Thinking back on it, I wasn’t all that sure if it’s cheaper to waste all that water while you’re waiting for it to warm up or to just let the stove burner heat it from a cold start, but after giving it a little more thought, I’m sure the burner is cheaper. Certainly, it’s a lot less wasteful of the water and I always try to be as “GREEN” as possible. Anyway, I put the eggs in the hot water and set them on the burner. When the water started to boil, I turned off the burner and started the timer on the microwave. (I use that microwave a lot, but generally not as a timer) When the time was up, I waited a couple more minutes, then dumped the hot water and ran some cold water over the eggs. PERFECT! When I started cracking the eggs, they were absolutely perfect. I had done something exactly right for a change.
Well, a few days later I still have nearly a dozen eggs that I bought and another dozen that the “snowbirds” left for me. I’m convinced I’ll never get these eaten up before they go bad, so I decide that I’ll boil up another dozen of them. I turn on the burner, and this time rather than run the water until it gets hot, I decide to just put it on the burner and let it warm up that way. I’m sometimes considered slow, but I’d come to the conclusion that wasting all that water might well be right at the top of my “STUPID LIST.” Oddly enough, I’ve been doing that same stupid thing every time I cooked pasta too, (probably every couple of years, or so.)
Well, when the water started to boil, I gave it another minute or two to really build up a good bubble, then I started dropping the eggs into it. Big mistake! as I was to find out later. Cold eggs, fresh from the refrigerator, tend to break open when they are dropped into boiling hot water. Strange, my sweetie never mentioned that to me. I’m pretty sure I wrote down her instructions word for word and never, not even once, did she mention that you need to put the eggs in before the water starts to boil.
So, when all was said and done, I had 7 eggs that looked like they might be worthy of refrigerating. They were cracked, but nothing was leaking out. The other five looked like they had farted and it froze all over them. Of course, that hot water should have killed any germs that were on the outside of those egg shells, so I decided that those five would become instant egg salad.
To top it all off, my sweetie and I are leaving in 3 days to go on a cruise. I’m pretty certain that I can’t eat up all these eggs in 3 days and I’m not at all certain that I want to eat them after we return. Can you freeze eggs?
Maybe I could “pickle” the ones that are left. What the hell am I saying? I don’t know how to “pickle” things.
Where is Martha Stewart when you need her?
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Gramps use’ta say
©R.L.King2012 #497
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