It pleases me to say, I’ve started writing our wellness newsletter at work. I’ve committed to writing one article per month this year to revive a long forgotten project as well as to fulfill my 2017 goal of doing something outside the norm. I won’t plan to mix that effort with this blog for the most part because the agenda will vary. This article though, including the season, makes it the perfect time to plagiarize my own work and give you a glimpse at why this this silly chicken might want to pass over that big road.
I don’t have little people at my house these days, but I do love chocolate, day-old marshmallow peeps (just stale enough to become interesting please), and hard-boiled eggs. I rarely remember to make hard-boiled eggs until the first full moon after March 21 of any given year. This is not because I’m lazy, but it is because I get busy with other things and then I just tend to forget about boiling eggs.
When I was a kid we decorated eggs, but then we agreed to eat every one of those eggs which we had decorated. That was an easy task for the first few days, eating the less pretty (decorating mistakes) first to keep our bounties looking beautiful despite the obviously injured van Gogh bunnies which still attempted to stand guard. By Wednesday it became more of a finish-your-plate type of chore… especially if the eggs were not cooked in an easy-to-peel manner. My little brother, apparently fretting high cholesterol, was famous for his post-holiday tradition of hiding yellow yolk balls all about our home (which is a not-so-pleasant surprise, barely comparable to an Easter egg hunt). My sister would try to claim she was the one who had decorated one of my very best eggs if she found it before I did on our Easter morning household egg hunt. My dad would eat my peanut butter candy egg while I wasn’t looking. My mom would sneak all the red jelly beans out from under the plastic grass in each of our baskets. Still, it is fun to remember the family tradition.
I’ve seen beautiful egg decorations using silk-dye, Kool-Aid, tissue paper, lace, cheesecloth, and string wrap methods. I am also old enough to know the joys as well as the perils of the “Decorregger”… oh and “Egg Arounds” were purely for cheaters. Once again though, I’ll skip past this part rather quickly and just get to the glorious eating of hard-boiled eggs.The most obvious solution for consuming a surplus of hard-boiled eggs (that is if you don’t have toxic bling-bling-pretty eggs, which were probably not meant to be eaten) would typically mean the sound of a crackling shell, rolling over the table and under your palm, and perhaps the grabbing of a salt shaker. For the professionally plated effect, there is the slicing or chopping of cooked eggs for use as a salad or sandwich ingredient. Also, from mild to diablo, deviled eggs never do yield any left-overs from our picnic gatherings, just sayin’.
There is another egg conversation for which I will need to rely a bit on my heritage. The definition of a pickled food would be one that is cured in vinegar or brine to preserve it for future consumption. It is a fascinating world of colors and flavors where the only rules are the limits of your own imagination. To ease into this topic, let’s start with the pickled-beet egg. The version of pickled egg I grew up with yielded bright purple outer eggs with still-yellow centers, as well as beets and onions which had each taken something wonderful from the fusion of flavors. I think 72 hours was the magic timing to properly color the white without coloring the yolk, but we always started eating the eggs in less than 24 hours and we never kept them around long enough to get to the full saturation of purple or then to the awful rubbery stage (I’ve only heard of these symptoms). If anyone would like to challenge me now on the proof point of 72 hours, I’ll be happy to play along and keep testing eggs till one of us gets it right.
The British have a simpler version of the pickled egg, which consists of eggs, vinegar, salt and sugar. I’m sure they are quite good, but where I come from, just the mention of any notably mild variety would have spawned a loud, proud, “bring-it-on”, pickled egg competition. By the time I was a young adult, we knew of mustard eggs, smoked pickled eggs, garlic eggs, Cajun eggs, and hot and spicy eggs. I thought my ideas of what to do with a hard-boiled egg might be the entirety of this month’s wellness article; I was going to simply expose you to the concept of my old favorite pickled eggs and send you on your way to try your hand at up-cycling some eggs this year. I was even prepared to throw in a few ideas of fresh herbs, pickling spice, turmeric, sriracha, chipotle, and habanero. But since I wanted to refresh my memory on that old mustard egg recipe, I just so happened onto a magnificent discovery. I want to share with you the tantalizing topic of TEA EGGS!
The basic concept of tea eggs is to boil the eggs until hardened, crack the shells (do not remove the shells), wait about ten minutes, then simmer the eggs again in some spiced liquid before transferring the liquid and the eggs to some glass or ceramic container to finish steeping in the fridge. The result should be a hard-boiled egg, marbled from some colored liquid seeping through the cracks in the shell, with a taste balanced between the egg flavor and the spices used. A classic tea egg is seasoned using black tea leaves and five-spice (cinnamon, star anise, fennel seed, clove, Szechuan pepper corn). You can opt to peel the eggs before steeping to save some time, but then you would lose that lovely marbled effect. On the Chinese mainland, these eggs are made with black tea leaves and soy sauce. In Indonesia, they use shallot skins, teak leaves or guava leaves. In Taiwan, they use raspberries, blueberries or salt.
There is even a Filipino street food known as Kwek Kwek, which is a tempura battered egg, oh wait, …that’s not actually a pickled egg, never mind. If I discuss Kwek Kwek, then I guess I would be remiss not to cover Balut, Century eggs, Scotch eggs, deep-fried-deviled-eggs, bacon-wrapped-beer-battered eggs, Egg Molee, Kai Loog Keuy, and of course the quandary of putting caramel inside a chocolate egg (which coincidently looks more like a tea egg than a pickled egg). I doubt anyone reading this wants an epic egg novel, so I’ll just stop here. I’ll put an extra dozen eggs on my shopping list and hit the publish button.