An Oeuf for the Books

My vision of egg salad was something that grandmas brought to picnics. My mental image of the dish was mushy, yellowy-gray in color, and reeking of mayonnaise. Never did I truly understand the beauty of a good egg salad until I moved to England.

Once a week I allowed myself to stop for a sandwich at the London-based sandwich shop Pret A Manger. One week, I had been late in getting out of class. The sandwich pickins' were thin, so I begrudgingly grabbed their egg salad sandwich. My life was never the same again. It was creamy, fresh, and delicious.

So the other day when I was alone at home and thinking what to make for lunch, I suddenly got a huge craving for Pret. I figured this was the perfect time to make my first-ever egg salad sandwich.

The first step was to hard boil some eggs. I had done this before, but more often than not they'd looked pale, with that thin grey line around the yolk. I was determined to figure out how to fix this. With some thorough research on TasteSpotting, I finally figured out how the pros do it.

To Hard Boil Eggs:

1. Place eggs in saucepan, and fill with cold water.

2. Bring water to a boil. Turn off heat, cover saucepan with a lid, and let sit for 7 minutes.

3. Remove eggs and place in an ice bath for at least 3 minutes.

See the difference? The egg on the left was over-boiled, and the egg on the right was prepared using the method above.

The next step was to put together the most parfait sandwich:

Ingredients

6 Hard boiled eggs

1/3 cup Mayonnaise

1 tsp Dijion mustard

1 tsp Grainy mustard

1/4 tsp Paprika

1/8 tsp Freshly ground pepper

Tiny pinch kosher salt (the mustard is already salty)

Directions

1. To peel the hard-boiled eggs, roll the eggs on a hard surface. The shell should crack and easily peel off.

2. Cut the eggs in quarters, and place in a medium-sized bowl. Using a fork, roughly chop the eggs.

3. Add the mayonnaise, both mustards, paprika, salt, and pepper. Incorporate all the ingredients together with the fork.

This salad is best served with two pieces of toasted whole-grain bread (still warmmmmm!), and a bit of romaine lettuce. The salad turned out to be so good, my parents made it their dinner! Woohoo!

Dimanche Gras

The past few weeks have been a complete whirlwind. Between traveling to job interviews for jobs for the fall, work trips for my current jobs and trips to visit friends to reminisce about the good old college days (in 2009.), I’ve been out of town at least once a week for the past two months. On Friday I got home from my last trip for a while, and I was pretty spent. On Sunday Mary asked me what I had done all weekend and at first I couldn’t remember, but then I realized I couldn’t remember because I had literally done nothing. I went to a couple of yoga classes and took some walks with my dog, but otherwise I was parked in front of a Say Yes to the Dress marathon. In tears. Take it from me, the life of a college graduate is pretty exciting.

Mary works weekends, so by Sunday night she was craving some comfort food, and I was right there with her. I’ve been taking adult education French classes at the local high school since I had a hard time letting go of college life, and since Mardi Gras was just yesterday (or so it seems), we had spent some time in my French class talking about traditions in Louisiana. Obviously jumbalaya was talked about at great length, so I convinced Mary that we should try to make it ourselves. It might not be considered comfort food in our region of the United States, but it is to many people in the South so we were game.

We compiled a few recipes, including my experience making (ok… watching someone else make) jumbalaya for 15 high school students in the middle of the woods and came up with a recipe suited to our tastes and went to work.

Ingredients

1 T. peanut oil

2 t. Creole seasoning

16 oz. package andouille sausage

1/4 large onion, diced

1/4 large green bell pepper, diced

1 stalk of celery, diced

2 cloves of garlic, minced

4 T. tomato aste

16 oz. can crushed tomatoes

1/4 t. red pepper flakes

1/4 t. ground black pepper

3/4 t. salt

1 1/4 t. Worchestershire sauce

1 c. uncooked white rice

3 c. chicken broth

1. Slice the sausage into rounds. Heat the peanut oil in a wok, Dutch oven, or large pot, and add the sausage and Creole seasoning. Sautee until the sausages are browned. Remove the sausages from the wok, leaving the oils in the wok.

2. In the same wok, sauté the onions, pepper, celery and garlic until tender. Stir in the tomato paste and cook for about two minutes before

adding the crushed tomatoes. Add the red pepper flakes, black pepper, salt and Worcestershire sauce. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Stir in the rice, then add the chicken broth. Let simmer for about 25 to 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. If the broth boils off completely, add more. The Jumbalaya should not be soupy, but it should have some movement to it.