How to Boil an Egg

I’ve been looking at my Google analytics page, and I’m not happy with what I see. So in the spirit of flailing to stop myself from sinking, this is now a food blog.

So: how to boil an egg.

About a week ago, I was talking to some friends about eggs. Yes, eggs! You know, those funky little pebbles that form under chickens. It turns out that they’re surprisingly good to eat. Now, I know, I know. You’ve heard things described as ‘good to eat’ before and found that they do not in fact taste bad, or just okay, or even pretty great. But don’t think you should ever not never let those many disappointments discourage you from trying new things. And I’ll tell you just how you can try eggs in this way and I hope you find them as good as I did.

This reminds me of an anecdote so interesting that I just have to share it. The other day, I was talking with a friend over a glass or two of spumante and lime cordial (I’ll have to publish that recipe someday!) Anyway he – or possibly she, I wasn’t really paying attention – told me that they were diabetic, and which of course means you can’t eat gluten or pork. It’s important to be up to date with food requirements that people have these days to make themselves feel special. So I assured them that the drink was fine, and I’m pretty sure that assessment would have been born out, had I inspected the cordial label. As it was, I just left them happily napping and went off to have more mundane experiences.

It was then that I ran into a charming little providore’s called The Supermarket, which is where I usually buy my pear flour and desiccated hair. This time, though, I saw a pile of cardboard boxes, each with twelve compartments and each compartment full of one egg making twelve eggs in total or one non-baker’s dozen. There are a bunch of workers at Supermarket, and for reasons of my own I assume that they are all called Tracey, so I asked a passing Tracy what these mysterious egg ‘cartons’ were.

“Are you shitting me?” asked Tracey, whose name was Rajiv.

I assured him that I wasn’t, and he told me that the eggs in the egg boxes were called ‘eggs’ and they could be cooked and consumed. Apparently, this is traditional in such exotic locations as Tuvalu and Albury-Woodonga.

Yum!

Eggs: the ‘facts’

You see, eggs are packed with nutrients, such as yolk and white. But the important thing to remember is that these ‘yolks’ are different from the ones you might put around the necks of your water buffaloes as you go out for a nice day’s ploughing. They’re like gumballs, except yellow and savoury and slightly flatter and also bigger and not quite as round. You should be very careful how many yolks you eat, because if you eat one you also have to eat the egg white which is quite poisonous when cooked.

Cooking, obviously, is an extremely important thing in my life. Just the other day, my wife was making me a cup of tea and asked how I’d like it. Twenty minutes later, she asked me to stop telling ‘interminable’ anecdotes. About an hour after that, she told me to shut the fuck up, she didn’t really want an in-depth explanation how everything that had happened to me that day, she just wanted some simple, clear instructions about how to prepare a specific food item. About three hours after that, she left the house. I assume she’ll be returning soon, with some nice hot tea.

While I was wandering the streets looking for her, I happened upon my favourite homewares shop. In the window, I noticed a peculiar sort of container with a label on it saying that it was an egg cup. What a coincidence! A cup for my eggs. I didn’t know that they had to drink anything. But with a cheery roll of her eyes, a shop assistant called Tracey explained to me how necessary it is to keep your eggs hydrated. I bought the egg cups without a second thought, and Tracey even sold me an egg-knife, egg-peeler, egg-rollingpin and several hundred dollars of additional egg tools. Score!

Cooking your eggs. How to do it? This way?

I returned home, which necessitated breaking a window since my locks had mysteriously been changed. I went into the kitchen to find a delicious way too cook these yummy nuggets of eggy eggness. This took quite a lot of experimentation to cook these eggs. They have an outer coating which is crunchy and yet not pleasantly so, and an inside that is somewhat like a Cadbury crème egg, only somewhat less sweet.

I tried a few different methods of cooking these eggs. Flambéing them seemed effective at first, but then the fire sprinklers went off, making me very wet indeed. But this gave me an idea: water! By using water to add indirect heat I could cook the eggs very effectively! So here’s my recipe

Boiled Eggs

Ingredients

Eggs

Water

Salt

Method

Boil egg until cooked. Eat with salt.

Mmmm! Delicious.