BACK! ...with deviled eggs

Well, it has been almost two years since my last post. I had been feeling stale and that I wasn't really adding much to the food blog scene, but I thought of a new project and I'd like to see it out, even if I don't continue posting after it's done.

Basically the project is this: I received a birthday gift of a cookbook some years ago, the Science of Good Cooking by the folks at Cooks Illustrated. I loaned it out and have recently received it back, and man, there are some good recipes in here! The book is organized by fifty cooking concepts, and I'd like to cook at least one recipe from each chapter. Beginning with...

Concept 1: Gentle heat prevents overcooking
Recipe: Deviled eggs

The concept behind this chapter is that if you heat food gently, you give the food a chance to warm up more evenly. Roast a piece of meat too hot and the outside will be burned by the time you bring the center up to the correct temperature.

I picked the deviled egg recipe to illustrate this concept because the other two were both huge pieces of meat - a whole turkey, a spiral-sliced ham, or a prime rib. I'm living alone at the moment, so that's a lot of meat for just me. I'd like to try the glazed ham recipe at the holidays, though.

The egg recipe works like this: you don't boil the eggs for a long time, you bring them up to a boil and then turn off the heat and let them sit in the hot water for ten minutes. So it's not really "hard-boiled eggs," it's "hard-cooked eggs." You get the same egg with a more reliable process.

I used some beautiful farm-fresh eggs from my weekend market:

This style of hard-cooking eggs is something I'd done before, but I don't cook eggs too frequently, so I often forget exactly what I'm supposed to do. However, when you use this method, you can see that you minimize the gray ring around the yolk:

The recipe for the deviled egg filling was a bit less moist than I'm used to: just mayonnaise, sour cream (I substituted Greek yogurt), white vinegar, spicy mustard, salt, and pepper. (My own deviled egg recipe usually also includes yellow mustard, but I liked how the vinegar gave these some acidity.)

I ate these for dinner, serving with some wilted greens:

The greens are a spinach-like vegetable that I got from my CSA. The recipe is below and is my own!

Wilted garlic greens

1. Coat a pan lightly with oil or melted butter. Slice four cloves of garlic thinly and add to the heated pan. Cook for about one minute, until golden brown.
2. Add handful of spinach or other cooking green and toss briskly in the oil and garlic until coated and begins to wilt. Do not cook the heck out of them, just do this for a minute or two.
3. Serve warm!

Next entry on the blog, probably in the next week or two, will be concept 2 from the book: high heat develops flavor, with the illustrating recipe of teriyaki stir-fried beef with green beans and shiitakes!