Egg Salad

My sister, Deb, has a blog, Debslunch, on which she talks about food she cooks, serves, and eats; you even get pictures and recipes of the dishes. I can’t pretend to offer anything like her insight into the culinary arts, but I am inspired by her to extol the virtues of my favorite dish for the last few days, egg salad.

I make it very simply: hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, French’s yellow mustard, and pepper. I’ve been experimenting with cut-up sweet pickles thrown in and while I don’t see them as a permanent addition, I think it’s not bad as a variation from time to time.

My favorite thing about making egg salad is using the egg slicer. I’m not big on kitchen gadgets, but this is one I’d prefer not to live without. I like how the hard-boiled egg sits in the one of the gadget’s two perpendicularly-arranged egg-shaped depressions and gets sliced into strips as you draw the wires into it. The tricky part, then, is lifting up the sliced egg and repositioning in the other depression so that it cuts the slices into squares.

I’m not sure whether it’s best to slice the egg vertically or horizontally first; I’ll bet there’s a “right way;” I go back and forth, though. Starting horizontally makes the sliced egg easier to pick up and turn, but then the vertical cuts tend to get smooshed. Starting vertically avoids that problem but at the cost of making the egg-turning more difficult.

When I was a little kid, my mom would let me use the slicer when she was making egg salad and it always seemed miraculous in transforming a simple egg into multitudes of white and yellow squares. I still find the process remarkable.

I’ve tried making egg salad without a slicer, just cutting the eggs with a knife. It doesn’t work; I ended up with randomly-shaped egg parts and the salad, even with the same ingredients, didn’t taste right