Flipping An Over Easy Egg

One of the reasons cooking remains endlessly intriguing to me is how it combines so many psychological, mental, and physical skills all into one lifelong discipline.

Even the simplest cooking tasks can be complex, rich experiences. I've written before about how cutting up vegetables and doing recipe pre-prep can be a deeply calming, meditative experience. Particularly when somebody else does it for me.

Most of the cooking tasks we'd think of as relatively easy (like sauteing vegetables, peeling potatoes, washing dishes, frosting a homemade cake and so on) are modest, humble tasks. They don't require skill so much as patience, a commodity increasingly in short supply in the modern era.

Patience. That's the key ingredient that makes it possible for these tasks to calm and relax us.

And finally, there are cooking tasks that, far from being humble, require both practice, skill and a weird overconfidence to do successfully. Think flipping an over easy egg, flipping an omelet or deftly dropping an egg into boiling water to be poached.

I'm not much of an egg poacher or an omelet flipper, those tasks literally intimidate me. I do, however, cook myself two over easy eggs for breakfast nearly every day. With over easy eggs, you have to know at what point a partially fried egg is ready to be flipped. Wait too long and the yolks are overcooked. Do it too soon and the eggs innards run all over the pan. Do it too slow or too fast and the yolk breaks, which ruins everything.

So when that moment comes you cannot be fearful. The egg can feel your fear. Which is why you have to perform these kinds of tasks confidently--or not at all.

Readers, what do you think? In your cooking lives, what kinds of tasks do you consider difficult, even intimidating? And which tasks are calm and relaxing to you? Share your thoughts below!


Read Next: Lessons Learned From a Bathroom Renovation


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Spices Gone Wild: Nutmeg's Surprising Secondary Use

If you are still thinking about making this week's Rumbledethumps recipe, but you were looking around for a lower-cost spice to replace ground mace, I've found an extremely compelling reason for you to consider nutmeg as a substitute.

You see, in addition to deliciously spicing up your home-cooked recipes, nutmeg has an unexpected secondary use--as a hallucinogen. From Wikipedia:

In amounts of 10-40 g (~2-8 teaspoons) nutmeg is a mild to medium hallucinogen, producing visual distortions and a distinct euphoria. According to some, the effects have a striking similarity to cannabis intoxication, except with a longer duration, and more side effects.

Wow. So using the midpoint from the figures above, my 2-ounce jar of nutmeg should provide me with 2-3 trips! All for the reasonable price of just $4.99! Suddenly, spices don't seem like such a ripoff anymore. And better still:

A user will not experience a peak until approximately six hours after ingestion, and effects can linger for up to three days afterwards.

Time to fire up a few Google searches! It's amazing what you can learn on the Internets. However, as always, there's a catch:

...use of nutmeg as a recreational drug is unpopular due to its unpleasant taste and its side effects, including dizziness, flushes, dry mouth, accelerated heartbeat, temporary constipation, difficulty in urination, nausea, and panic.

Uh, does anyone have an idea of what they might mean by "temporary" constipation? And it gets worse:

A risk in any large-quantity ingestion of nutmeg is the onset of 'nutmeg poisoning', an acute psychiatric disorder marked by thought disorder, a sense of impending doom/death, and agitation. Large doses of 60 g (~12 teaspoons) or more are dangerous, potentially inducing convulsions, palpitations, nausea, eventual dehydration, and generalized body pain.

Way to take the fun out of everything, Wikipedia!
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Note: Casual Kitchen readers hereby indemnify and hold harmless the writer of this blog from any and all claims, damage, lawsuits, judgments, including attorneys' fees and costs, arising out of: bad spice trips, bad recipes, bad writing, and any other dumb idea acted on by said readers as a result of reading this blog.

Related Posts:
Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels
Fake Maple Syrup
The Shandy
Final Update on the Chocolate Mousse Cake

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by linking to me, subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels

Now that I've shared my preposterously easy and highly authentic Black Beans and Rice recipe, let me share a story, the moral of which is this:

Always read ingredient labels. At least glance at them.

Long time Casual Kitchen readers will recall from elsewhere in this blog how I've encouraged you to make all recipes by the book at least once before attempting any recipe modifications. Well, this time, going “by the book" kind of backfired on us.

But because I usually try and follow my own rules, this meant blindly following the instructions on the label of a can of Goya black beans, which is where I originally found this delightful and simple recipe. So when the recipe called for "two packets Sazon Goya without Annatto," I obediently grabbed a box of Sazon Goya packets. I was already in the Spanish foods aisle anyway, and hey, I was only following orders.

Unfortunately, after Laura and I had finished dinner, we started to feel just a tad bit hypotonic. I take that back. It was more like we'd been hit by a rusty shipping container-full of sodium.

Laura picked up the box of Sazon Goya and started reading the ingredients:

INGREDIENTES:
Glutamato Monsodico
Sal
Ajo en Polvo...

(Whoops! Wrong side.)

INGREDIENTS:
Monsodium Glutamate
Salt
Garlic Powder
Onion Powder
Spices
Spice Extracts
Natural Color
Tricalcium Phosphate (anti-caking agent)

Now I understood why we felt so woozy. Not only does this spice mix contain a lot of salt (as the second ingredient listed), but it contains even more MSG--salt on steroids! And I'm still trying to figure out what tricalcium phosphate is, but in any case we weren't even trying to make cake.

Needless to say, we made our modifications for the next time, and this second-order spice mix was left out of the recipe.

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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

Final Update on the Chocolate Mousse Cake

"Did you eat a piece of my chocolate mousse cake?"

"No."

"Did you serve a piece to your parents or something?"

"Um, no."

"Well, I can tell you opened the freezer bag the cake is in because of this nice knot you tied after you were done."

"That's because the other day I cut a piece of cake for YOU."

"Oh."

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I'm just a couple days from (finally) finishing this glorious chocolate mousse cake once and for all, and this is what's become of me. I've turned paranoid, possessive and passive-aggressive (some might disagree with the "turned" part).

It's not quite as bad as Homer Simpson and his rotten submarine sandwich, but it's close.

Carousel Cakes Factory Outlet
5 Seeger Drive
Nanuet, NY 10954
Tel: 866-659-CAKE

Related Posts:
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Chocolate Mousse Supreme Cake Update

The Recipe Filebox

Even after just a year or two of cooking, after collecting recipes and cookbooks from various and sundry sources, you'll probably find your recipe collection growing out of control.

We tend to be slow learners here at Casual Kitchen, so even after nearly two decades of eclectic recipe collecting (and countless diregarded opportunities to get organized), we're still stuck fiddling around with loose papers stuffed randomly into recipe books, recipes cut out from a bag of lentils, and even recipes cut out of the side of a cardboard box of couscous. Seriously.

Take it from us: a small recipe filebox with lettered dividers is an absolute necessity in the kitchen so you can find those recipes when you need them.

Which brings me to an amusing tale about the idiosyncracies of how people organize recipes.

My mother prefers to file things under functional categories. For example, in her recipe file box, the letter "M" contains all of the "Main Dishes" she makes. So when I'm in her kitchen looking for a house favorite like Mock Wild Rice, I won't be able to find it. I'll be foolishly rooting around under "R".

Laura on the other hand tends to be extremely literal in her filing approach. The first letter of the recipe is the letter it goes under in our file box. This is a strict system: for example, if a recipe starts with the word "The"--yep, you guessed it, it goes under "T".

So for her, a dish like our laughably cheap Red Lentils and Rice definitively goes under "R" for "Red".

Of course, I'm in deep trouble whenever Laura refiles one of our recipes. Because of my stunning lack of adaptability, I simply will not be able to find it. I'll search and search under "L" and then I'll close the file box, then re-open it, flip to "L" and take just one more look. I'll never think to look elsewhere.

In Psych 101, they'd say I lack mental plasticity. I'm like a blind chicken that keeps pecking in the same place, never figuring out that the kernal of corn is, uh, over there.

I just wish the world would adapt to my system, which is an ingenious and flexible filing system that, according to Laura, makes no sense whatsoever. So Red Lentils and Rice of course goes under "L" for Lentils. Mock Wild Rice goes under "R" for Rice.

Fortunately, at least in the case of Mock Wild Rice, my wife and my mother totally agree that it should be filed under "M". Although of course for different reasons.

But at least both of them can find the recipe.

Cooking, Simplified by Wall Street

This is just a brief post about a conversation I had with Laura on a Saturday morning a number of years ago.

Maybe “conversation” is the wrong word to describe it, as you’ll soon find out.

It’s the best single illustration of how my career on Wall Street forced me to simplify my approach to cooking. I guess at that point in my career I was able to handle making only a finite number of choices and decisions over the course of a week. And when I exceeded that finite number, I would start to come a little bit unhinged mentally:

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Decisions, Decisions

Laura: Dan, I think I'm going to make a pie today!
Dan: Great! Cool.
L: What kind of pie do you think I should make?
D: I don't know. Whatever pie you want to make.
L: Should I make a blueberry pie?
D: Okay.
L: Or how about a peach pie?
D: Sure that sounds great.
L: Or how about a cherry pie?
D: Okay.
L: Hmmm, maybe a blueberry pie would be better. But a peach pie sounds good too.
D: Uh-huh.
L: Or how about this....a cherry pie, but with peaches in it!
D: Ehhh. I don't know.
L[In an increasingly excited voice]: Hey, how about a peach pie with blueberries in it?
D: Uh... I don't know.
L: Or what do you think about a blueberry pie with peaches in it?
D: Idon'tknowIdon'tknowIdon'tknowIdon'tknow--I DON'T KNOW!!!! [At this point, I either whimpered or let out a little girly scream, I really don't remember which. ]
L: Whoa.
D: Woo. Uh, sorry. I guess I just couldn't handle all those choices there. I've been making a lot of difficult decisions over the past few days.
L: You've gotta get the hell out of Wall Street, you know that?
D: Yeah, wow. I guess you're right.

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I share this "conversation" with you to show why, from this point on, I sought out ways to simplify my cooking--and everything else in my life for that matter.

This is why in this blog you'll see so many examples of simplifying and modifying recipes, and why I’m always on the lookout for different examples of really easy dishes to cook. It also explains why I’m always looking for ways to get faster at cooking and why I look for ways to judge recipes before I cook them.

I sincerely hope you're not the type of person who wigs out on a Saturday morning after one or two too many pie questions. :) But I hope you enjoy and benefit from my advice and suggestions all the same.

The Deep Fryer: A Crisis of Conscience

I was in Wal-Mart the other day picking up some stuff, and I went through some of their kitchen items looking at baking pans and other things. I was stunned at how cheap everything was--proving once again that cooking at home is laughably cheap.

But then I saw it, teasing me with its placement at the end of the aisle, with the smiley face and the tantalizingly rolled-back price of only $29.99: An electric deep fryer!!

Wow, think of the things I could make with this!

Fried chicken. French fries. And I could really do Paul Prudhomme's fried hush puppies and catfish up right too, rather than my current method risking life and limb by using an open, splattering, non-stick pan. Heck, maybe I can find out once and for all whether deep-fried Oreos are as revolting as they sound!

But then I had a crisis of conscience. How often, really, will I deep fry? I was troubled--and deeply confused--by all the paradoxes that would be involved in making the purchase of this deep fryer "worth it."

Will this be the type of item that I use a lot after buying it to justify why I bought it? And if so, will I, by making the purchase justified, end up needing multiple angioplasties twenty years from now? What exactly does "worth it" mean in this case? By making an economically sound decision, will I merely buy an early and untimely end to my cooking voyages of discovery?

Is this like buying your own do-it-yourself crystal meth kit in order to save money? ;)

So, I dealt with all of these paradoxes and ethical dilemmas the way I always do: I cheated and took the easy way out. I decided to buy it because I thought it would be fun.

I'll keep you posted on what I make and I'll post any new recipes worth passing along.

Cracked Eggs and False Advertising

A really quick one today about the ironies of life:

Ever since I posted How to Make a Perfectly Boiled Egg Every Time, I have screwed up boiling eggs. I'd had a months-long streak of uncracked, easily-peeled eggs with no problems. But of course, within minutes of publishing that post, I started on a downward spiral of failed egg boiling. I've been batting less than .500 for more than two weeks now--I wouldn't even qualify for the cooking minor leagues with that kind of cracking average.

Even my wife is considering suing me for false advertising!

Let's hope this phenomenon doesn't repeat itself when I launch my investing blog.... :)