Catching up, plus Deviled Eggs

Hey all!

It's been much, much too long since my last blog update. Very sorry about that, I genuinely WILL TRY to go back to an update schedule of every other week at a minimum. So. What have I been up to since... gosh, has it really been since last summer, basically? I've had many blog posts I meant to write. My dining experience at Per Se. The rest of my trip to Italy. The many various things I've cooked over the last 6 months or so. Well, I've been up to a lot in that time. Benson has visited twice. I've gone to Baltimore more than one might expect, including a week of housesitting plus keeping an eye on my grandfather who recently moved down to an assisted living place in Baltimore. A dear friend of mine got married and had a lovely wedding. I gave a public outreach talk on some interesting debates in the history of astronomy, plus have participated in other outreach activities with the astro department. I've been running/attending a movie night with friends in the department, too, so lots of good movies, there. My research has been going well, and I've been working on some papers and gotten several proposals in, and even accepted (well, my research group has, and I've helped). I went to the AAS meeting in National Harbour, MD, to present a poster on my research. I got glasses, and want to get a monocle (but these are a bit hard to find prescription). I bought some single malt scotch with some of my Christmas money. Benson went to Cambridge, so we've been adjusting to an all-new 5 hour time difference. I went to the beach in Ocean City, MD. I wrote a couple pieces of fanfiction (you saw the piece for the WTNV election, my last blog post!). I've been spending too much time on the internet, particularly Tumblr, AO3, Facebook, etc. I've been going to Chinatown semi-regularly with a group in my department, mostly for dim sum though recently for the Chinese New Year and peking duck (amazingness!). I went to my 5 year Brandeis reunion. There was Christmas. Iceskating and sledding with Benson. Watching too much TV, including a new season of Sherlock, starting Supernatural, the Sopranos, and the usual Doctor Who, Homeland, HIMYM, and other shows. Played a few good computer games - particularly Fez and the Stanley Parable. Movies: Godfather Trilogy, Hunger games, Desolation of Smaug, Pulp Fiction and Resevoir dogs (in a one night Quintin Terintino marathon). Hung out with my friend Lloyd and cooked with them a bit as well. Went to a Doo-Wop festival in Wild Wood, NJ, dressing all 50s in a poodle-skirt both for that AND Halloween. I may do some mini-blog entries on some of these things, we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, with this "sort of" entry, I figure I'll post a "sort of" kind of recipe. I made some deviled eggs last weekend for an Oscar party I attended Sunday night, so there we go!

I've always loved deviled eggs. It's probably one of the first dishes I made on my own without help or recipe from my parents. I'm not counting sandwiches or scrambled eggs or cake mix here, or a recipe I made 100x with my mom before doing it again by myself - I mean a recipe I sought out on my own. This is also not counting the numerous instances when I was really young when I would mix spices, water, and food coloring to make 'magic potions' - those were pretty inedible, considering they were made entirely of edible substances. Anyway, deviled eggs. I ate them for the first time... probably at my aunts New Years Eve party or something similar... and really loved them, so resolved to make them on my own. I don't know the age when I started making them, but it was probably sometime in elementary school.

Now, my recipe is a bit different than most deviled egg recipes because of this. When I was younger, I HATED mustard. Would not eat it. Could not stand it. So that very classic ingredient in deviled eggs has been substituted by thousand islands dressing, which apparently my childhood self decided was the obvious substitute for that much-hated condiment. And I think it works very well.

The other thing about this recipe is that it doesn't have 'proportions', per se. I just tend to add each thing until it looks/tastes right. My usually 'stopping' point for adding ingredients is and always has been that when I can't stop myself from tasting it because of deliciousness, that's when I can stop.

This recipe has also evolved to be spicier over the years. The hot sauce is a relatively recent (ie, college-aged me) addition. This is because, in addition to my spice-tolerance growing, my mother dislikes spicy food. In fact, I'd always fill a couple eggs early for my mother prior to adding some of the spices (like the old bay and chili powder) before making the rest of the egg fill more spicy for my dad and me. I contained this trend of a separate early non-spicy batch in college for my dear friend Kaila, who has an even more extreme spice intolerance.

So my point is, this is not so much a recipe as much as a flexible set of guidelines for how to my style of (awesome) deviled eggs. Modify and taste throughout for your best personal results. Feel free to experiment until you find the combination that's best for YOU. But DO include the Old Bay - it is my not-so-secret key ingredient.

Deviled Eggs

Eggs (hard boiled and shelled)

Miracle Whip

Thousands Islands (French) dressing

Hot Sauce

Spices:

      Old Bay

      Cajun seasoning

      Chili Powder

      Paprika

      Pepper

      Anything else you think might be delicious, like chives, if you have them!

Obviously, the first step is to boil and shell however many eggs you are planning on making. I usually make a minimum of 6 at a time. I have a very nice egg transport container, with little divots for the eggs so they'll be stable, and that will hold 20 half-eggs, so when making them for large groups I'll make a dozen, eat 2 of them, and put the rest into the container for transport! So. Once you have your eggs boiled and shelled, slice them all lengthwise (as shown) and remove the egg yolk and put it into a small mixing bowl. The egg whites go into your egg container to be filled later.

Now, first, add in *roughly* equal parts Miracle Whip and Thousand Islands dressing - not *quite* equal, though, I tend to put in a bit more of the Miracle Whip than the dressing, because I like the tang. How much of each of these, you ask? Well, that depends on the number of eggs, for one thing, so add a bit at a time and MASH everything with a fork. You want the yolks to form a thick paste - on the creamy side of crumbly, and as smooth as you can get it, like really thick icing. When the texture seems pretty good, take a taste to balance the Miracle Whip/dressing ratio, make sure that's good, and then you can start adding your hot sauce and spices. The amount of hot sauce, of course, depends on how spicy you like things and the spiciness of the sauce in question. I have a thing of "Dave's Insanity Sauce" which I've been very slowly working my way through for a while now, because a little goes a LONG way. As far as spices, I'm VERY generous with my Old Bay (being a Maryland Girl at heart). But the cajun spices are also a really good addition and I put those in with a fairly liberal hand as well. And of course, chili powder and pepper for a bit more kick, and you can't make deviled eggs without paprika. All I can say for this bit is just keep mixing and tasting. This time I also happened to have some chives in my fridge, so those turned out to be a really nice addition, but I don't usually have those around.

Once you're egg-paste is to your satisfaction, you can fill your egg yolks. I would be generous in how much you put in each egg - it's better to have nice fat eggs and just munch on an empty egg white or two than to be skimpy here, I feel. Plus, you've added mass to the egg whites by adding in the Miracle Whip and the dressing, so you should be able to fill most of them. Once that's done, for a dash of color (and a bit more spice) I toss a dash more of Old Bay and paprika (and sometimes the cajun seasoning, or in this batch, chives) over the top as a lovely decorative touch!

Anyways, hopefully this is a useful set of guidelines for deviled eggs. Also hopefully it won't take me forever to update this blog again. I do like writing it, I just got busy and then out of the habit of posting. Ah, well! Such is life. Like I said, I may try to do a few mini-blog entries describing a few of the things that have gone on in my life in the past 6 months in a bit more detail in the future!

A Few of my Favorite Things

Being a Baltimore girl, originally, my favorite food is crab - specifically, a nice big pile of Chesapeake-caught Blue Crabs steamed with Old Bay seasoning. This spread is, unfortunately, something that is not only seasonable but area specific. However, you can still get decent crab elsewhere in the country - but when I do so, I generally make sure I'm getting the whole crab, or obvious chunks of crab (legs, for example), rather than something that is 'stuffed with crab' - since I've found that unless you are particularly careful about your source, those sorts of dishes end up with more random filling than crab, or even utilize FAKE crab (which is an abomination of culinary arts.) 

And the one dish I avoid like the plague is "Maryland Style Crab Cakes" (when outside of the Chesapeake Bay area, that is, of course I've gotten decent crab cakes in both PA and VA and at home in Maryland). In Baltimore, the best crab cakes are from G&M's (not counting the homemade crab cakes of my Aunt Dot, but those aren't exactly available to everyone!). These crab cakes are the size of your fist, if you happen to have very large hands. They're bigger than my fists, anyway - they're literally half a pound each, and most of that is solid crab. You have huge chunks of backfin falling out of it, they're lovely! There are many other excellent crab cakes in Baltimore, of course, but these are my favorite. My point is, I have high standards for crab cakes. But with only the very rarest of exceptions, I've found crab cakes made elsewhere tend to consist of the barest flakes of crab, held together by massive amounts of something that ISN'T crab. I'm not saying that there aren't any good crab cakes away from home - just that I've gotten tired enough of being disappointed by crab cakes that I've stopped ordering them all together. And when I keep an eye out for other people's crab cakes orders, they generally confirm my impressions. 

You can often tell a crab cake is going to be bad by simply looking at it: if it looks like a firm, smoothish, patty - it's going to be mostly fill and crab flakes; a PROPER crab cake should be mostly crab, with some other stuff that holds it together - hopefully just barely enough other stuff to hold it together - and  the larger chunks of crab meat you can pick out, the better. And I've gone to restaurants, NICE restaurants, which have very good sea food in general and where I really enjoy the food, and seen crab cakes which make me wince just at the sight of them. So I've pretty much given up on LOOKING for decent crab cakes, unless chance favors upon me. I have found, by chance, exactly one place in New York City that has a decent crab cake sandwich - Red 58 has a solid crab cake BLT. I didn't order it the first time I was there, but a friend of mine did. And when I tried a bite I was most pleasantly surprised! I'm not saying its the best crab cake you'll ever have, but it, you know, actually tastes like a crab cake, which means it tastes good. So when we've gone back there for drinks and dinner, I've ordered it ever since. So now, I have one place in New York that I can go for such things. Again, I wouldn't be surprised if there are other places in NYC that have decent crab cakes, and if you know of one, please! Let me know!

When I consider non-crab favorite foods, there has always been one dish which springs to the top of my list. This is my favorite dish that is on my regular meal rotation, and has been for some time. Fettuccine Alfredo is both easy and straightforward to make, and absolutely delicious. Now, healthy? Not so much. My family's nickname for the dish is "heart attack on a plate," which is a fairly accurate descriptor: it's all butter and cream and cheese and deliciousness. It's been one of my favorite dishes for as long as I remember, before I ever even tried crabs, and is pretty much my ultimate comfort food.

Fettuccine Alfredo

1/4 c. (4 tbs) butter

1/2 c. heavy cream (or more, if you wish)

1/8 lb parmesan cheese (at a minimum – I tend to add extra)

Salt

Pepper (fresh ground)

1 lb fettuccini noodles

You can make this with pasta that isn't fettuccine as well, and to be honest, the above picture is technically linguini alfredo. But pasta substitutions are relatively minor - you might need a little more or less of everything to coat pasta variations with different amount of surface area, I guess. Additionally, something related to parmesan cheese, like asiago or romano cheese, are also valid substitutions. I like to buy solid blocks of cheese, then grate off the amount that I need - it tends both to be less expensive, and keep better. Cheese graters are handy things to have! 

Anyways, whatever your noodle choice, cook them as directed until they are tender - they should be more on the undercooked than the overcooked side, since you'll continue heating them as you add the additional ingredients, but cook them to your taste. Strain the noodles and put them in a pot on the stove top. Cut the butter into 1 tbs chunks or so, and mix into the noodles until they are well coated with butter and the butter is melted (this should be done over low heat). Add cream, continuing to mix over low heat - you want to keep mixing the noodles so that nothing scorches. Grind in generous amounts of pepper, to taste. My mother doesn't really like ground pepper, so when I'm making this at home, I always have to just put a little on and add the rest later to my own plate, but when I'm cooking in NYC, I can add all the pepper I like - which is quite a lot. I also tend to be a bit heavy handed with the salt. Next, still on low heat, add in the cheese slowly, and mix well - it should get nice and melty.  . Serve immediately. Add salt and any additional pepper to taste -this means grate fresh black pepper generously across your plate, and a nice extra dash of salt, as well!

If everything seems a bit dry, add a bit more heavy cream until it's properly moist. If it's too moist, just add more cheese. I like lots of cheese, so I end up with both a lot of cream AND a lot of cheese - this is not a bad thing. Honestly, I don't really bother to measure out the ingredients anymore since I'm so familiar with this recipe, I just add things in until it looks right. It's a pretty simple recipe, but a delicious one, and definitely one of my favorite things.