TEXT 2: COOKING SKILLS
by Richard Lee King Before you read: 1) Are cooking skills necessary nowadays? 2) To your mind, who are better cooks: men or women? 3) Can you think of any amusing or embarrassing anecdotes that involved cooking?
I’ve never claimed to be an expert cook, but it seems that I still have chances to be considered average one day… So, here’s the deal. I’ve been living alone for most of the past 25 years. You’d think that I could have developed some cooking skills in all that time, wouldn’t you? No! I do cook from time to time, if it can be done in the microwave or the toaster oven. And I do the occasional meatloaf in my range oven. My specialty is the crock pot soup. And I make a mean pot of chili. Oh, and I have a Grilling Machine of the George Foreman variety[*]. It works great for hamburgers and steaks. I’ve even done a fish fillet or two, and the skinless, boneless chicken breasts aren’t bad either when cooked on it. But, when it actually comes to cooking, I’m pretty much in the dark. I don’t know if boiling eggs is considered cooking, but for the purposes of this little romp through the recipe book, let’s say it is. It’s late April, maybe the 25th and my “Snowbird” friends have been talking about heading back to the north country. They usually leave shortly after May Day. Before they leave, they often pack up their leftover groceries and deliver them to me as they head out of town. Well this year, amongst the things they had left over there were two dozen of eggs that they didn’t want to take on the 1,300 mile trip back to their homeland. So they dropped them off at my house as they headed out on the road. I probably should plan better, but you just never know what jewels are going to fall into your lap on these occasions. Besides, I figured I had another week, maybe even two, before they would be heading out. So, as it happened, I had shopped for groceries just the day before their departure and – yes, you guessed it – I had bought a dozen of eggs. Mind you, I’m single and I eat out nearly as often as I eat at home. Just how long do you suppose it takes me to go through a dozen of eggs? Two dozen? Three dozen? I’d still be eating eggs next Christmas. Well, to solve the problem, I decided to boil up a dozen of the eggs and possibly make some egg salad sandwiches out of them. I know how to boil water, and I figured that boiling eggs couldn’t be much harder. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve boiled eggs, but I have to say that when they were talking about a 3 minute egg, I don’t think they were talking about boiling them. That first try didn’t work out so pretty well. When I cracked them open, they were a little runny. I wound up pitching most of them out. But I’m a pretty fast learner. The next time I boiled them for about 20 minutes, then just to be safe, I let them set in the hot water until it cooled. That time, I might have overcooked them a little bit. So, this time, just in case there was some little trick to it that I hadn’t learned yet, I called my friend and asked her just how long I should boil them. Well, “It’s simple,” she says, “you just leave the burner on until they start to boil, then turn off the burner and let them set for 15 minutes.” I thought I could handle that. This seemed like a pretty simple scheme. So, for the first dozen of eggs, I turned on the burner and let it get hot while I ran the water in the kitchen sink until it got hot. I’m not sure if it’s cheaper to waste all that water while you’re waiting for it to warm up or to just let the stove burner do this and heat it from a cold start. Now that I think about it though, I’m pretty sure the burner is a little cheaper. Certainly it’s a lot less wasteful in terms of water. Anyway, I put the eggs in the hot water and set them on the burner. When the water started to boil, I turned off the burner and started the timer on the microwave. (I use that microwave a lot, but generally not as a timer). When the 15 minutes’ period was up, I waited a couple more, then dumped the hot water and ran some cold water over the eggs. Perfect! When I started cracking the eggs they were absolutely perfect. It seemed that I had done something exactly right for a change. Well, a few days later I still had nearly a dozen of eggs that I had bought and another dozen that the “Snowbirds” had left for me. So, I decided that I’d boil up another dozen of them. I turned on the burner, and this time rather than run the water until it got hot, I decided to just put it on the burner and let it warm up that way. Then, when the water started to boil, I started dropping the eggs into it… Big mistake! As I was to find out later, cold eggs fresh from the refrigerator tend to break open when they are dropped into boiling hot water. Strange, my friend had never mentioned that to me. I’m pretty sure I wrote down her instructions word for word and never, not once, did she mention that you need to put the eggs in before the water starts to boil. Well, each time I dropped an egg into the boiling hot water, I heard a little popping sound. Pretty quick I started seeing little floaters in the water and some of the eggs were floating to the top of the water. After the first 4 or 5 eggs the water had cooled back down to the point where it wasn’t bubbling so much and, in retrospect, I think that was a good thing. Anyway, when all was said and done, I had 7 eggs that looked like they might be worthy of refrigerating. Some of them were cracked, but nothing was leaking out. The other five leaking ones looked unfit for that purpose. Of course, that hot water should have killed any germs that were on the outside of those egg shells, so I decided that those five would become instant egg salad. I put the rest of them back into the egg carton for use at a later time. On top of all this, my friend and I are leaving in 3 days to go on a cruise. I’m pretty certain that I can’t eat up all these eggs in 3 days and I’m not at all certain that I want to eat them after we return. Can you freeze eggs? Maybe I could pickle the ones that are left? But then I don’t know how to pickle things… That would call for another story like this.
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