esrosedotblog

I first started cooking when I was a kid.

8 years old maybe. Both my parents worked. I was a latchkey kid. I was asked to do a lot of things around the house which I don't think kids "these days" are not expected to do but I don't want to start on that and sound like an old codger. I actually have no idea how kids are raised today or how they learn to cook.

It amazes me that kids or anyone else learns to do anything. I am old enough to look back now and marvel at the prodigies of learning I was able to do.

I imagine actually it is the same today. Most of my kids both work and their kids do the work themselves. OK.

Shit.

How did I get off on that? See? It is very easy for old guys to get into this mode and I have made a vow not to do it but this bs rolled out the ends of my fingers so I will leave it in to let you know I am not really as nice a guy as I may have always seemed to you.

I will start again.

I first started when I was a kid. 8 years old maybe. Both my parents worked. I was a latchkey kid.

The first meal I remember preparing was the Saturday night staple. Standard. Hamburgers and beans. I can still taste them. It.

The beans came from a can. Campbell's I think. The hamburger was the one kind we got from the store. I suppose ground scraps of an indeterminate fat content. It was greasy as hell and I know that I would not serve it today. Heart consciousness has ruined my eating at that level.

Anyway, one thing at a time, I picked up learning to cook. Mostly by trial and error.

I graduated to the kind of cooking my mother did. Overboiled frozen vegetables with the most done meat you ever ate. Hard, stringy. It was what we were used to.

We didn't eat eggs bare. So I didn't learn about the intricacies of that until I went to college and worked as a short order "chef". A grill jockey.

There, everything comes off a hot grill. It all gets mixed up. If the eggs taste like burgers so be it. All day breakfasts. You can still get that taste today if you can find the right greasy spoon diner which are rare indeed.

My business partner Alex was a fan of diners and knew every one in every location in every town in suburban NYC and beyond. I thought I was an expert until I started going to that kind of place with him. I continued that research on my own for many years. We go to a restaurant here whose owners are Greek and come from that era. It shows in their close to the edge cuisine. They serve breakfast all day.

I can still fry an egg and do the bacon on the side if called upon but that is no longer even a thought anymore. How have I lived so long?

Where was I?

Eggs.

In all my cooking, then and later, after all my cookbooks. After all the top of the line cooking equipment, the KitchenAids, the convection ovens, the grill in my own house, I have ended up in a conventional cooking situation. A gas range. A microwave. No baking, well except for the non-yeast rise kind, and no fancy food at one end and no equivalent of diner food on the other.

What about eggs?

I read, some years ago, about a woman who had made it to 90 something and they asked her what the secret was.

She said that she had always eaten an egg a day. Bingo. It sounded right to me somehow.

I started doing it.

Now, I eat two eggs ever day. I am richer now and more affluent than that old lady.

I am not afraid of the cholesterol as I have a lucky heart. A fortunate processing system for a range of fats. Low cholesterol.

But I still eat the egg beater kind for lunch, scrambled with ketchup on a sandwich.

Every other morning, I have two hard boiled eggs because hard boiled is easy and also I love to eat them. Laden with salt incidentally. Fuck the blood pressure.

Now, the payoff of all this blather.

In all my years of hard boiled eggs I have never, ever, unraveled the mystery of the hard to peel egg.

I have tried everything.

The plunge into cold water at the end. The easy boil. The rollaroundinyourhand and sneak up on the shell method. All of it.

Nothing worked.

Until a few weeks ago I went to the internet out of frustration and, once more, asked the question. "How to get easy peel boiled eggs".

And for the first time I found someone who said unequivocally that the age of the egg is the most critical factor and that older eggs were better because the shell had some separation as a result of drying through the shell membrane to the egg itself. It made a small space.

What?

I always have striven for the freshest eggs. Even straight out of the chicken when we had the small truck farm.

NO. The oldest.

Extensive research over the last few weeks confirms this. 100%. Unbfuckingbelievable.

I guess that you can learn something after middle age. Something new. A breakthrough.

Never give up.

Labels: cooking