egg salad breakfast with asparagus

Fixed! With cayenne, not pictured.

NAB, 12th in a series.

Hard-boiled eggs at altitude are little different from hard-boiled at sea level because they're not actually boiled. Therefore we must call them hard-cooked for now on.

Eggs cook at 180℉ / 82℃ no matter what the altitude. Anything above 200℉ / 93℃ is overkill. They tend to toughen when overcooked. The trick to technique is to cook them as little as possible as low as possible. Bring the water to a boil, then take the pot off the heat. The eggs continue to cook in the heated water. These jumbo sized eggs were cooked in hot water for 10 minutes at one mile elevation eggzakly. Sorry. The water temperature starting out was 200℉ / 93℃.

Start with room temperature eggs. Chill in ice water immediately. If you have difficulty pealing and for large batches, leave the eggs out of the refrigerator overnight which has the effect on peeling as does aging. Chill after cooking. Roll on counter to crack the shells into tiny bits. Start pealing around the equator then pull off the poles, if the eggs were globes which they're are not, they're eggs.

This is a subject so gravely important it appears early as page 89 in McGee's On Food and Cooking, the veritable chef's Bible on all matters scientific and the chief influence on such gastronomic luminaries as Heston Blumenthal to name but one of many others. The greenish gray discoloration that forms on the surface of hard-cooked yolks is a reaction between iron in the yolks and sulfur in the albumen. The reaction takes place at that interface between white and yolk because that is where the two come into contact. The reaction can be minimized by using fresh eggs, cooking as briefly as possible, and chilling immediately. See? The three things that go into great hard-cooked eggs.

* These hard-cooked eggs were pushed through a ricer using the plate with the largest holes. Clever, eh?

* A minimal amount of home-made mayonnaise was used, just enough to hold it together.

* Chives, diced onion, diced celery, cilantro.

* Asparagus steamed, in a proper steamer this time using one of those expanding metal steaming baskets for a scant five minutes.

* Asparagus dressed with olive oil / lime

* Two exceedingly thin 4 inch sourdough croutons, which actually would have made a nice sandwich had I used a little more mayonnaise with the egg for cohesion and had the bread been larger.

eggs and vegetables with wine sauce

NAB, 7th in a series. You'll notice immediately what could be stir-fried vegetables substituting for a giant pile of filler starch. Grain is present sparingly and judiciously in the form of naturally leavened whole-wheat bread, just a small portion mind you, a little of this dense bread goes a long way. Unless you're a teenage male, in which case a single sandwich made of meat packed between an entire loaf cut lengthwise might hold you off between real meals.

The sauce is red wine with butter and it's surprisingly good on the vegetables.

scrambled eggs

* Two eggs lightly, just barely scrambled, nearly not cooked through. Then loaded with enough crushed -- Achoo! -- black pepper to turn back a stampede of enraged bison. <--- possible exaggeration.

* Slice of sourdough bread toasted in the same pan the eggs were cooked, which produced a single whiff of smoke sufficient to set off the fire alarm screaming. And that is sooooo obnoxious. Hurts my sensitive furry Ferengi ears.

* Fingerling potatoes, cut, boiled, fried in butter. Fingerling, that's Marketspeak™ for pewny genetic miniatures grown at short-season latitude in nutrient-deficient soil. Whatev. They're très chic.

raw salmon on sourdough toast

Parents, hide your children.  The little darlings would not like this. 

Raw salmon on sourdough toast.

Pacific salmon from pre-packaged frozen filets. I picked one of the brightest filets in the larger package and carefully sliced, then diced by hand.

Anything, and I mean anything, is better than plain Philadelphia cream cheese, which seems to me a blank whiteboard upon which actual flavors are intended to be written. Therefore, I scribble away. Supplemented with my own handmade ricotta, which wasn't very much, along with commercial ricotta. But then ricotta is hardly much of a flavor improvement over Philadelphia, then is it? Therefore I fortified it with some incredibly strange raw Wisconsin cheddar which is, oddly enough, spreadable. So there's four different white spreadable cheeses and its cheesy flavor is not ordinary. Plus horseradish, and S/P.

The sourdough is toasted to about 85% toastiness because the bread goes Melba if you toast to 100%.