I have an extremely embarrassing secret to tell, but here it goes: I can't boil an egg. I'm serious. Generally, if you turn me loose in a kitchen, I can perform appetizing feats of international gastronomic proportions - anything from French bread to Indian curries. I love to cook, and there are few other places in the house that make me as happy as the kitchen. Yet hand me an egg and a pot of water and it is as if I have never ventured near a stove top range before. No matter how many times I've tried valiantly to conquer the mysteries of the egg, all attempts have ended with the same dismal failure.
This is certainly not for lack of trying. About once a week, I optimistically set a pot of water and an egg on the stove and turn up the burner. Once the water has started to bubble, I cover the pot, reduce the heat and wait minutes, hours, days, it doesn't matter. The results are always the same; eventually I fish the egg out and carefully peel it under cold water, noting that the peeled egg is suspiciously malleable and bulging like one of those water weenie toys that are so much fun to throw at people.
Taking a breath, I carefully slice the egg open, at which point the uncooked yolk oozes out like pus from a giant pimple and, as I am usually holding the egg in my hand, often burns me slightly. Sighing in frustration, I drop the egg on a plate and slide it in the microwave where it immediately explodes and flings globules of white and yellow every which way. I open the microwave and retrieve the few hunks of egg still clinging to the plate, noting that they have been transformed into dense, rubbery-like objects quite resistant to being chewed.
This routine never varies no matter how many times I attempt to properly hard-boil an egg. One on momentous day, I actually succeeded in letting all the water boil away in the pan and the egg still was slightly raw. You'd think that by now, I would have resigned myself to an eggsalad-less existence and given up hope, yet there is some vestigial of hope rattling around in my brain that believes that one day I will plume the depths of this culinary mystery and unlock the secret.
While I wait for this happy event to come to pass, I wile away the hours setting pots to boil and attempting to answer another great egg question - how do you tell a raw egg from a cooked one without cracking it open? My favorite answer to this question is the spinning egg trick. In theory, a hard-cooked egg should spin smoothly around if twirled and a raw egg, no doubt due to mass displacement or some other scientific principle, is supposed to lurch about in a wobbly orbit, thus making it easy to distinguish what egg has already been cooked.
In practice, I've found that all the egg really does is leap away from my spinning hand, dash frantically across the counter, and plunge over the edge to its death, where it shatters and reveals that it was, in fact, a raw egg. I've wasted a lot of perfectly good raw eggs this way, but considering that I am somewhat lacking in the talent to cook them anyway, they would not have been much use whole anyway. Eggs come to rather tragic ends in my house, either being blown to smithereens in the microwave or smashed against the kitchen floor.
As far as I have been able to make out, the Egg Mystery is somehow intrinsically bound up with the Frozen Turkey Enigma. This phenomenon has not yet materialized in my house, no doubt because I have never attempted to cook a turkey before, but it is an inescapable occurrence at my parents' house. Our family consumes turkey on a regular basis, especially since I gave my dad a turkey fryer for Christmas, but we have never begun one of our numerous fowl meals with a completely defrosted turkey. A rock-solid frozen turkey will lurk in our fridge for months on end, pointedly refusing to melt and become flesh again in time for dinner.
Generally, the turkey ends up in a bowl of water on the counter, in the sink being hurriedly defrosted, or just being shoved in the oven as is and commanded to cook. I have vivid memories of that one fateful Thanksgiving where Dad took a pair of pliers to yank the frozen giblets free from the body cavity.
When Thanksgiving rolls around this year, I think I will try to cook a turkey at my house and see if the Frozen Turkey Curse has been passed through the family lines to me. Maybe sometime come November, I will be surreptitiously running hot water over a frozen fowl carcass and hoping I won't give anyone food poisoning from improperly defrosting it. But until then, I'll keep battling ahead in attempts to answer the Egg Mystery.
