i am the eggman

A little over a year ago, Mrs. Pincus and I decided that it was time to stop eating like ten-year-olds at a birthday party and start eating like adults. We eliminated all sweets and desserts and began a self-imposed diet regimen centering around a large salad for dinner. 

This is a stock photo.

Each evening, we stand side-by-side at our kitchen counter and prepare our leafy evening meals together. We each have our specific jobs in the preparation. I extract the various components from the different storage areas of our refrigerator and place them on our kitchen counter. Our fridge is regular stocked with fresh salad ingredients like lettuce, red cabbage and scallions (or green onions — the jury is out on which of those we actually use). I pile the items on the counter and Mrs. P chops them or slices them or slides them into a blade on a mini-mandoline slicer — whichever utensil or portioning method is appropriate for the particular element. While my wife adds things to her salad that I would never eat in a million years — like cucumbers and tomatoes — I begin my own customization process. I add jalapeno peppers, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers and bread & butter pickles (that's right, I like pickles on my salad! You wanna make something of it?). It is also my unofficial job to open a can of salmon for each of us. We have gotten used to including salmon on our salads and the salads seem incomplete without it. Sometimes, Mrs. P  makes fresh salmon and, believe me, it is much better than the canned stuff. Once topped with our personal choice of dressing (low-fat thousand island for Mrs. P and whatever is in the refrigerator for me), we accompany our salads with a baked potato and another fresh vegetable (usually broccoli or my new-found favorite cauliflower) and we're all set. We have been eating the nearly-identical dinner every night since February 2019 and we haven't tired of it yet. As a matter of fact, almost every night, one of us will remark how good the salad is and marvel at how it can be so delicious night after night.

Just for the sake of variety, we switch things up every so often. Instead of a baked potato, we will have a bowl of pasta made from shirataki, a Japanese vegetable. Or sometimes, we have a bowl of soup and Mrs. P will sauté a bunch of peppers, onions and mushrooms in garlic and oil for something she likes to call "Peppers, Mushrooms and Onions in Garlic." (Although it plays an integral part in the recipe, the oil is unjustly left out of the name of the dish.) We also look for other things to add to the salad. We have tried sun-dried tomatoes and French-fried onions. More recently, sliced hard-boiled eggs have become a regular part of our salads and I have become quite the hard-boiled egg aficionado. (Yes, it has been added to my resume just under my skills with PowerPoint.)

This is a stock photo.

Once a week, I dutifully fill an enamel pot (my wife showed me where we keep it) with water from the tap, just enough to cover a single level of eggs that will be placed at the bottom. I place the pot on the stove and turn on the flame, just like Mrs. P showed me. (I am not exactly Mr. Kitchen, so I appreciate the guidance.) Then I carefully add the eggs to the pot of water. I inspect each one for cracks before placing it in the water, sometimes turning them over several times and even holding them up to the light. Then, I wait until the water boils. When it does, I kill the heat, put a lid on the pot and I'm done.... until my favorite part.

Peeling off the shells.

This is also a stock photo.

I don't know exactly what it is, but I find peeling the shells from hard-boiled eggs very therapeutic. At first, it was sort of a challenge. I found myself pulling small chunks of the hardened albumen away with the tiny fragments of shell. I realized that there was a thin, almost invisible membrane that is between the shell and the egg white. I had to remove that membrane as well as the shell in order to keep the white in tact. After a while, I discovered different techniques with which to successfully remove the shell and be left with a perfectly smooth hard-boiled egg. I even watched a few YouTube videos showing several vastly different methods to attain the ultimate goal of the unblemished egg white. Some prescribed adding the eggs to already boiling water. This, as the video claimed, would prevent the membrane from creating a strong bond to the solidifying egg. Another suggested peeling the egg under running water or — better yet — submerged in water. I read an article on the internet about the subject (this is what my life has come to), including one that insisted on chipping away a quarter-sized opening in the shell on the wide end of the egg, then forcing a metal teaspoon into the opening and rotating it around the circumference of the egg. The promise being that  this action would force the membrane to separate and the hard-boiled innards would just pop out with no resistance. This has yet to be tried by me. There are other procedures that include adding vinegar or salt to the boiling water, but I think I will pass on those.

This is why I use stock photos.

I have found a technique that works well, using a little bit of several of the techniques I learned. I peel the eggs over the sink with a constant, fairly forceful stream of cold water running from the tap. I crack the egg fully on the edge of the sink and roll it around until the entire outer surface is covered with a spiderweb pattern of fractures. Then, it seems, that the shell is easily removed and the egg is left glistening, its exterior uncompromised.

So, what have we learned? Well, we learned that I have an awful lot of free time on my hands and that, given the opportunity, I can write four full paragraphs about hard-boiled eggs.

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