What I Learned from Eggs

November 10, 2014 Off By Lisa

My Daughter asked for eggs for breakfast this morning.

She did it completely right, too. She decided last night that she wanted eggs for breakfast this morning. She asked politely if someone would make her eggs for breakfast. She even specified the preparation method – hard-boiled, please.

Well done, Zilla!

But despite the advance notice, those eggs delayed us a good ten minutes in our morning routine.

You see, instead of jumping on that advance notice and making the eggs last night, I left the task for this morning. Never a good choice. Mornings here do not have a whole lot of margin for error. (My Mother will insert here that they should, because that just makes sense, especially in a house that runs on ADHD, and she’s completely right, of course. But that’s not the point.)

In addition, the Hub and I both stayed up far too late last night working on projects we needed to tackle before the week began. I was disinclined to get up fifteen minutes earlier and while he did get up early (and rather pleasantly), he was already busy shaving his head (takes work to make that bald head beautiful). See where I’m going here? The eggs were going to be a speed bump, at the very least.

In theory, I should have been able to pop into the kitchen to make the eggs while Zilla got dressed. But left to her own devices, she will stall out, get distracted by something, and fail to remember that she’s supposed to be getting dressed. So I enlisted the help of the Fab Hub. Now remember that the Hub is culinarily challenged (his term). While he has learned to make quite a few basic things rather successfully, hard boiled eggs are not one of those on the list. So I tossed him instructions as I continued to herd Kidzilla. So far, so good.

Kidzilla had a hard time turning off the brain last night and struggled to fall asleep. So while she was not uncooperative about getting up this morning, she was mildly unwilling and definitely slow to make progress. Because she was a little low on sleep, there was a thing about the droopiness of the tights she was wearing and she got stuck on that for about five minutes. On another morning, we might have compensated by grabbing a mug of milk, a protein bar, and some apple slices, left on time with breakfast to go, and been right on time for school.

But today there were eggs. And Kidzilla is not yet skilled at eggs to go. We needed ten minutes at the table. Ten minutes we did not have. So like any mother concerned with making launch time so the child is not late for school, I prodded Zilla to hurry.

You’d think I would know after six years of living with this child that this method rarely works. OK, it never works. All the little idiosyncrasies of her personality kick in and her speed actually slows until all that remains is a frustrated Mommy barking and a frustrated Kidzilla growling. Oh, and because I was trying to rush the whole process, I skimped on the egg time and decided they could come out of the hot water two minutes early. Wrong. Now the damn eggs wouldn’t peel which slowed us down even more.

By some miracle or time vortex, we did make it to school on time. And when I got home from dropping off Kidzilla, I decided to boil some eggs for another morning this week, just in case Zilla wanted them again. As they were cooking, I realized there was something to be learned from eggs.

Trying to rush things along rarely proves to be effective. Sometimes you have to slow down to get things to move faster. Sometimes you have to take a step back before you move forward. There’s a reason football players choose to drop back and punt. People are going to move along at their own pace, events are going to unfold in due time, and hard boiled eggs really do need ten minutes in the water to come out perfectly.

That said, allow me to share the method I use for making perfect hard-boiled eggs. It works every time…provided that you actually follow the directions and don’t try to rush the process.

Emeril’s Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs (found many years ago via Emeril Lagasse)

What you need:

  • eggs
  • water

What to do:

  1. Place eggs in water, then bring to a boil. Boil for two minutes.
  2. At two minutes, shut heat off, cover, and let sit eleven minutes.
  3. After eleven minutes, put eggs immediately into iced cold water.
  4. Peel and eat! If the eggs don’t shell easily, they aren’t cooked right.

Tip: A very long time ago, someone taught me that to keep egg shells from cracking when you hard boil, prick one end of the egg with a pin. To this day, I keep a standard pushpin in my kitchen drawer and always prick the butt end of an egg before hard boiling. It works! Of course, you have to be gentle, but it’s easier to do than you might think. It’s especially helpful at Easter time when you want smooth, uncracked shells to color.

Good things come to those who wait.

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