September 27, 2015

Deviled Eggs

Look at them. Sitting there. Plotting.
I try not to get too judgy and religious, except about the truly important things like which way you hang your toilet paper. But it's high time that we, as a community of people on planet Earth, got together and stopped calling Deviled Eggs...Deviled. Because it's stupid. It's a term that was invented to describe any food prepared with hot seasonings because "omg spicy hot equals hellfire equals DEVILED!" Back when this became a thing, people were used to eating boiled mush, if they were lucky (Don't ask what they ate if they were unlucky.) The point is, to them, an incredibly small amount of pepper or mustard was mind blowing, and clearly the work of the delicious delicious devil. We don't have that same indoctrination in to the world of bland. So shut it already.

Ingredients:

3 standard issue Eggs (Chicken is preferable)
1/2 TBSP Mayo
1/2 TBSP Sweet Relish 
1 tsp Dijon Mustard 
1 average human sized pinch of Salt
1 smallish human sized pinch of Cayenne Pepper
An unspecified amount of Smoked Paprika

The first thing you're gonna need to do is boil up your eggs. Sure, that sounds easy, but over cooked eggs get weird discolored yolks, and the yolks are heavily featured in this recipe, and if they don't look just right you'll RUIN your niece's quinceanera. Fortunately, I'm here to help keep you from getting disowned. At least for food related reasons. I can't do anything about that van with the mural of a tiger riding a centaur. Good luck with that. But for the eggs, you're gonna just barely cover them with water in a pot and throw it on to medium heat. Wait approximately forever until it boils, then cover the pot and turn the heat off. Let the eggs sit in the hot water for 14 minutes, and then put them in cool water to keep them from over cooking. 

Now comes the fun part, and by "fun," I mean "give up now. Seriously. Pack it up. Go get a burger or something. It's not even worth it anymore." Because now it's time to peel your eggs. Technically, there is a thin membrane between the egg and the shell, and if you work your finger into it just right you can peel off the shell without much hassle. This works about 60% of the time. The rest of the time, your life becomes a ghastly hellscape of peeling tiny bits of your egg at a time and trying, with increasing desperation, to convince yourself that the large bits of egg you're inadvertently tearing off are extra bits. As if you got your eggs from an Ikea Chicken who decided to throw in some extras just in case you need them. 

You can always tell when I'm posting from out of town by
the different dishes. Also...because I just told you. Forget that.
Once your eggs are peeled and you've stopped weeping, cut those suckers in half to get at their sweet innards. Scoop out the yolks, and mash them up with your Mayo, Relish Mustard, Salt, and Cayenne. This is the part where you exact sweet vengeance on your eggs by mashing their innards and stuffing them back inside of them, like some sort of gruesome egg-inquisition. Stuff each egg with as much filling as you can muster, and then sprinkle your Smoked Paprika on top of them. How much? Figure it out. Its delicious, but the paprika here is about 50% ingredient and 50% garnish, with a 10% margin of error. And that's it! You've got delicious eggs which credulous medieval serfs might think is the work of the devil because it's got spices! And the devil's eggs leads to the devil's toast, which leads to loose morals, which leads to ritual human sacrifice. Which leads to mixed dancing.

2 comments:

  1. They look delish! I had always understood that deviling meant something about "scooping the insides out of something, mixing them up with all sorts of other stuff, and shoving them back in." That's a relatively dastardly concept, no?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The phrase came about around the 18th century to describe heavily spiced, or spicy foods. The fun of disemboweling food and stuffing it back into itself is just a happy perk.

      Delete