Hello and welcome to the inaugural Egg Report, where every week I’ll be reporting on the eggs I made, rating how well I made them, and excavating the obvious and not-so-obvious links between the making of art and life and the cooking of eggs. Hmm?
I focus-grouped this idea on my close friends story. As you can see, the support was overwhelming.
I’ve been eating eggs for a few years (refused them as a kid), but I only recently learned I like them “dippy.” These are the kinds of eggs you see in brunch videos on Instagram, where a knife punctures the white’s stringy membrane and the yolk leaks out over biscuits or toast or rice or whatever. Those videos used to really wig me out; I think they still do. Something sort of scatological about watching the insides become outsides like that, in such a bright color. A bit too close to what it’d look like to cut a person open and watch stuff spill out. However, it doesn’t wig me out when I am the one doing the cutting. Curious!
I have decided in recent months that this is how I would prefer to eat my eggs — running all over the place.
The problem with making dippy eggs at home is that I find it an incredibly difficult and delicate task. I’m in a race against time, and time is usually winning. The part where you flip it … how do you know how long to leave it on the yolk side? You can’t see what’s going on down there; how am I supposed to intuit what’s just the right amount of time? How do I get it to not stick to the pan? What’s the true and factual difference between over-easy and over-medium, and is there a name for what happens when your eggs come out somewhere in between? These questions — and many more — I hope to answer through my continued learning and the documenting of my journey. (I am also, of course, open to constructive feedback.)
But really, this is just my excuse to force myself to write something with regularity over the summer; put my fingers on the keys and make words with the letters and then make those words into sentences, and release myself from shame, self-consciousness, and defeat! The eggs are my guide — I am merely the vessel for their story! I am the toast, the rice, the biscuit, the bagel.
Tuesday, May 27: 5/10
I’m not sure how these photos show up for you, but for me, they’re taking up my whole screen and I’m kind of rethinking what I just said about runny eggs not freaking me out anymore. These were fine, which is why I’m giving them a modest 5. I ate them with a piece of buttered toast.
If you look closely, you will see that the toast punctured the top of the egg, but interestingly, the yolk escaped through a broken seam on the side, instead of on the top where the toast entered. Not sure why that happened. I can’t seem to get the tops of the yolks to develop that pimple-like dome — they’re usually pitifully flat — or the white to cook into that almost new-skin-like texture. To me, if they’re done perfectly, eggs done over-easy should open like a ripe blister: flimsy proteins stretched to the limit, just barely holding together the liquid inside until the tiniest little poke sets it all loose. Instead, mine always come out somewhere close to over-medium, with too fortified a white protecting the yolk. I suspect this issue has something to do with my pan (more on that later), or the quality of my eggs, or what fat I use to cook them in (butter vs. oil?) Hopefully, I will answer these questions as I hone my craft!
Wednesday, May 29: 2/10
What you see above is a lesson in not always following your creativity. I don’t fully remember my choices in assembling this lunch; I think I was tired of toast but knew I needed a grain component with which to soak up the yolk. What I opted for — leftover couscous with chicken stock that I made in the microwave the night before — was not the right decision. I am learning!
I sauteed mushrooms and then because I was doing that, I thought to add this umami multi-purpose seasoning to my eggs while they were cooking. Trader Joe’s has a liberal understanding of what “purposes” fall under their “multi-purpose” umbrella. This stuff didn’t taste like much. When you try to be everything, you end up as nothing!
Missing some color, I added raw arugula. I meant to squeeze lemon on it, but I forgot. By the time I remembered, everything had been assembled and I was scared of what would happen if I squeezed a lemon on a runny egg yolk. That fear is rooted in the fact that sometimes fresh meat can twitch and contract when it’s cut or salted; the muscles’ nerve endings are still alive enough to react to the external forces acting against it. I imagined the yolk having a spasm due to the acid of the lemon, congealing into sturdier goop, and then I’d be too close to the life-potential of the egg to ever eat one again.
At some point in the construction of this lunch, the combinations made sense in my head. Not so on my taste buds. In search of a familiar life-raft to carry the whole thing, I doused it in soy sauce. That didn’t really solve for the structural errors made several steps earlier.
I wouldn’t eat this again.
Friday, May 29: 6/10
This is the part where I show you the state of the pan I’m cooking eggs in. I think it was, at one point, non-stick. I bought it at a Value Village in Maryland last summer. When it came home with me, it did not look like this. I’m working on my tendency to cook things at too high a heat. I do not want to hear about the various chemicals I’m putting in my body when I consume food from this pan. I have radioactive goo on my nails that gets baked into my cuticles with an LED light, and I still put my fingers in my mouth, eyes, everywhere, all the time; I don’t wash my water bottle the recommended frequency; last weekend, in a port-o-potty that was out of toilet paper, I used the cardboard of the empty roll to wipe myself. These are just examples of the personal philosophy that leads me to use this pan several times a week without concern. I will eventually replace it.
As I was taking a break from writing this very Egg Report to make lunch (eggs), I got too in my head, thinking about the links between the abject/Zizek’s spit-in-cup example of disgust and my fear of runny eggs on Instagram and whether or not to write about these loose associations in my Egg Report, that I went right ahead and broke the frickin’ yolk!
BUT…How beautiful is it that it kinda looks like an inverted quotation mark or a comma that got tired of standing up straight? It also, very strangely, looks like the shape of an actual fetus that’s positioned head-down in the womb…well…that’s a damm 7/10 to me!
These eggs ended up being good and fine. I put salt and pepper on them and ate them with one piece of buttered toast and one piece of bread that was just cold and not buttered. It gave me the fuel I needed to write this post and then run so late for a doctor’s appointment that I ended up canceling it entirely.
Okay, that’s it. Hopefully, see you next week? Gotta be honest, odds of me sticking with this are low on account of my willpower and the price of eggs. Please send me recipes and tips and things to make with eggs!
BONUS QUESTION
Is it gross to butter a pan by just rubbing it on whole, like a glue stick? (Keep in mind, this is shared butter in the household.)