More A-Peeling Does Not Make Them Any Less Appealing

So, you know how the five passengers of the SS Minnow set out on that three-hour tour? And were stuck on a tropical island for what seems like eternity?

That's how my deviled-egg-making went yesterday.

I know the deviling of the eggs takes a long time. Don't I do it every holiday? But the task was interminable on this morning. That's because in all of my store-tripping, I neglected to buy eggs. "But Val," you might ask, "why do you need to buy eggs when your very own yard chickens, the ones who haven't been devoured by the neighbor dogs, of course, supply you with fresh eggs daily?"

Ah, yes. You're thinking of my lovely pastel eggs laid by our Ameraucana mongrels. The ones who started out so precious, with their blue and green eggs, only to interbreed with some black pantalooned chickens with feathery legs and feet. Not that there's anything wrong with that. We're not running a chick hatchery where we sell purebreds. No, the eggs are still pretty, with the greens of the Ameraucanas, and the browns of the blacks. But they are STILL fresh eggs. Hick stuffs them into cartons and jams up the whole bottom shelf of Frig II with them. Then every Saturday, he takes them to the auction for his buddy. I'm sure some money changes hands. Not that I ever see any.

The problem with fresh eggs is that they don't boil well. Okay. They boil just fine. They don't PEEL well. No matter how I try to follow advice that I glean from the internet, like adding salt to the water, or leaving them in an ice bath after boiling, or letting them spend a night in the refrigerator, just chillin'. They don't have that air bubble at the top, so you can tap tap tap that end and crack the shell and roll it all around, then peel it off in almost one piece. Nope. The shells of boiled fresh eggs must be fans of James Frey, because they crack into a million little pieces. A million little pieces that don't cling to the skin and peel off in large sections, but rather stay in a million little pieces and stick to your hands and must be pried off one by one by one by one by one by...well, I think you get my point.

Those shells of boiled fresh eggs cling to the whites tighter than midwesterners bitterly clinging to their guns and bibles. Tighter than Newt clung to Ripley in the final minutes of the ultimate showdown in Aliens. Tighter than Val clings to a piece of gas station chicken. Sometimes, you may think you've beat them, with the end of a piece of egg skin between your thumb and forefinger...and then a flesh-like layer of the white several millimeters thick comes off in your hand. Uh huh. That fresh boiled egg is like a jawbreaker, coming apart until only the yolk is left at the center.

And what a yolk it is! So orangey. So tasty when fried. So robust. It makes the yellow yolk of its city cousins pale in comparison. Huge yolk! Like an October full moon on the horizon.

Lucky for me, I found some store-bought eggs on the bottom of Hick's egg cartons, with some eggs left over from when I made The Pony's birthday cake. They were still good. They didn't float to the top of the cauldron when I set them on to boil. So I had eight store eggs and eight fresh eggs. The store eggs took 10 minutes to peel. The fresh eggs took 40 minutes.

But at least we got some delicious deviled eggs from the sweat of Val's brow.

The fresh ones are on the left. You can barely see their pock marks. Val is the school picture photo re-toucher of the deviled egg crowd. The eggs on the right are the store-bought ones, obvious from the blunt ends that made for such easy peeling, yet give the appearance that Val sampled them during deviling. The yolks were combined with some mustard and mayo and sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper and the secret ingredient, dill pickle juice.

A round of deviled eggs for all my blog friends! This is only half the batch, the other half having been set upon a Chinet plate to be mostly devoured yesterday by Thevictorians.

Yum.