tipnique of the week, December 6, 2013

Some of you were born knowing how to boil an egg.
I know this because in my hard-boiled egg quest, I asked many of you for advice and was told that it was

I nodded silently, because to do otherwise would've been to admit that sometimes

pie's not that easy for me either.

Then Alton Brown (swoon) exploded my mind with the idea that the idea is to hard cook the eggs, whether or not they're actually boiled.  So now that's what I do. But that's not the real tip. The real tip is what happens after the eggs are cooked, and how I stopped getting confused about whether or not I was about to put a raw egg in a lunch sack or crack a boiled egg into cake batter. But first...

Here are the eggs, going into the steamer that came with this set of pots- the water is already boiling, so there's steam aplenty.

you can use any steamer as long as it'll sit above the boiling water
and allow the pot to be covered with a lid.

Because the eggs were straight from the fridge cold, the timer was set for 15 minutes. Room temperature eggs require a little less time.

After 15 minutes, the eggs are transported to a bowl of icy cold water.

All outdoors is a giant walk-in freezer today, so the water
was decoratively chilled with a frozen rose branch.

Minutes later, they peel this easily-

and look this pretty:

Tender whites, fully cooked yolks that slip right out of the
whites without a gray film.

After years of wasting time trying to remember which eggs in the fridge were cooked and which were not (of course the cartons could be labeled,  but what if you don't want to take up two egg cartons of space for three raw eggs and two cooked ones?) the eggs started wearing a mark.

First I tried touching a dot of food coloring to the shells of the cooked eggs. Messy, and sometimes the color seeped through the shell.

Then I thought about marking them with a sharpie, wondered it that might be toxic, and decided that if I wanted to poison people, there are more efficient ways. 

Then I penciled a large H on the shells of the cooked eggs. Easy, safe and effective.

And then I thought...."wait a sec.... If the eggs are already getting penciled, why can't they be penciled with something a little more fun than a single letter"? 

After all, the marked ones will always be the cooked ones, no matter what the mark is...

So today there are a dozen eggs in the fridge ready for salads, or snacks, or lunches, or deviled eggs, and they look like this:

True, it's a long way from the intimidating level of food art on display in a bento box, but then it took only a minute or so (I meant to time it, but then I started having fun and forgot) and it counts as a success as long as it spares us a few minutes of confusion-

I'd love to hear of any tips you use in your own kitchen, and I'll bet you have many more than you realize!