We\’re going to a family reunion today, for my mother\’s side of the family (the Wadsworth side) although the Wadsworths are pretty much extinct at this point, so it\’s really the family of my mother\’s half-sister who is organizing it. No matter.
I figured \”What is more family reunion-ish than deviled eggs?\” They\’ve always been around at every other family reunion, summer picnic or what-have-you. So I bought a couple of deviled egg plates, each with the capacity for 20 eggs, and a couple dozen eggs. Deviled eggs. Easy, right?
I awoke this morning knowing that Peg had cooked the eggs for me last night (while I was playing radio – sweet). I went back into the radio shack/office, sat down, made a few more radio contacts, and then Googled \”deviled eggs\”. Well, as in all things, there are specialized web sites. The Deviled Egg Gourmet in particular caught my eye. I read through the directions for cooking eggs, peeling eggs, and the like. Very interesting. Turns out my mother had it all wrong for all those years.
Then I turned to the recipe section. I had two trays, each capable of holding 20 deviled eggs. The recipes I found used six eggs. OK, a little quick division. 40/6 = 6.6666. So that 1/4 cup of mayo is now 1 2/3 cup, the salt scales up likewise, the dry mustard, the pepper, the vinegar, too. I added a bit of ground hot pepper, a quarter cup of sweet relish, which I drained to keep the mixture on the stiffer side. Few things are more disgusting than deviled eggs with a soupy filling.
Well, I mixed that up, and it was pretty loose. I added the reserved four egg yolks, and it was still about the consistency of a thin cake batter. Grrrrr. I knew I should have just gone with the Betty Crocker recipe. I checked, and Betty calls for 3T of mayo instead of 1/4 cup. Yep, that extra T of mayo was what did me in.
I heard Peg stir upstairs, and went up to ask if there was anything I could do. She\’s pretty good at knowing recipe recovery paths (not that there\’s any particular reason, mind you, that she should have any experience in pulling a recipe back from the edge of disaster, except perhaps from watching me cook for 33 years).
I explained my process. 40 deviled eggs, recipe for six eggs, so I scaled everything up by 6 and change.
\”Nope. Only four. Half-dozen eggs to two dozen eggs is a four-to-one increase. You didn\’t have forty eggs.\” Boy did I feel stupid. It wasn\’t, you might guess, the first time.
(She promised not to tell. But I thought it was pretty entertaining, so I\’m ratting myself out.)
By this point, the stores were open again so I ran out and got another two dozen eggs, and started over.
So that\’s $6 I\’ll never see again. I still used most of the eggs she cooked for the whites. She had peeled them too, and more carefully than I had. I swapped out a few of the more off-center eggs and replaced them with some of the more on-center eggs that I had cooked, and filled them with a really fancy squirter that Peg had gotten at a Pampered Chef party. So that part was fun…
