Simply Peel the Eggs

I haven't eaten a deviled egg in about 10 years, but when I'm suffering the after effects of margarita overindulgence I get spectacularly random and irresistible food cravings. Peeps! Potato gratin! Pickled beets and gorgonzola salad with apples! Nacho cheese gordita! And last Saturday morning, loud and clear, DEVILED EGGS!!!

It sounds so easy. Eggs in pot, boil water, heat off, cool egg, peel egg, bedevil egg, eat egg. All was going swimmingly right up through "cool egg," but then the trouble began. My modest eggs refused to be disrobed.

At first I thought I just had one prudish egg but the others turned out to be equally stubborn - I fed them the finest champagne and murmured sweet sweet nothings into their smooth ears (?) but their shells wouldn't budge. There was no way to get those shells off without damaging the egg so much that, even after deviling, it would be mangled beyond desirability.

Egg salad. Sort of like deviled eggs, although without the paprika and the opportunity to dig out the icing tube, right?

I nosed around for some recipes and didn’t like what I found, not one bit. Pickles, celery, all sorts of ingredients that didn’t seem quite right. I realized that what I still wanted was deviled eggs, only in sandwich form. And I thought even that might be a little dull, so I dug around my fridge and came up with this very tasty recipe:

MeBeth’s Egg Salad Sandwich

6 eggs, hard boiled
1/3 cup mayo (only Hellman’s)
3 T Dijon mustard
1 small squirt (approx ½ tsp.) Sriracha
½ tsp red wine vinegar
Wheat bread (toasted, if you prefer)
Lettuce
Sliced tomato
Bacon

Cook the bacon while the eggs are hard boiling (see below). When the eggs have cooled, peel them (ha ha ha) and separate the whites from the yolks. Roughly chop the whites and set aside. Place the yolks into a food processor and add the mayo, mustard, Sriracha, vinegar, and a little salt and pepper if desired. Process until the mixture is sort of fluffy and reaches the consistency of deviled egg filling. (You could probably do this with a fork if you didn't have a food processor) Add yolk mixture to egg whites, stir. Apply lettuce, tomato, bacon, and egg salad to toasted bread. Eat.

The best method I’ve found for hard boiling eggs is as follows:

Place eggs in a pot and cover them completely with water so that they are 1" below the surface. Bring the water juuuuuust about to a boil, remove the pot from the heat, and let it sit for 7 minutes. Remove the eggs and place them in an ice bath until they are cool enough to peel.

I suppose you could make this sandwich much healthier by reducing the amount of mayo and by using some turkey bacon or fakey bacon (fakon?), but then if you’re going to that extreme you might as well just substitute sprouts for bacon, omit the egg salad, and double the lettuce. Mmmmm.