The Amazing Patented Unpeelable Egg!

Ever wished your chicken eggs weren't so darn easy to peel? Ever found yourself making egg salad (again) and felt the ennui spread over your whole body because there's just no challenge to it anymore? Have I got some exciting news for you: now all you have to do is find yourself some super fresh eggs and your egg peeling experience will be transformed from one of boring ease to one that offers a chance to test your patience and determination to have egg salad, which, unless you're removing lots of yolks and editing your mayonnaise consumption, isn't good for you anyway.

That's right, and when I say "fresh", I mean eggs that are less than a week and a half old. Maybe your store bought eggs say "farm fresh" right there on the package...don't be fooled. You will be hard put to find actual fresh eggs at a store. If you can hard boil 'em and peel 'em with ease, they aren't fresh. How do I know this? Because I have eggs that are so fresh they are still warm from the chicken's...you know. Everyone who raises hens knows that fresh eggs don't peel well. So if you want to boil them, you need to wait at least a week. So I set a dozen aside for hard boiling purposes and let them wait around in the fridge for over a week. Just about a week and a half. They were still too fresh to peel. What a waste!

You know what that means, right? That means that store bought eggs are even older than that. Probably two weeks old. I have never once had difficulty boiling and peeling eggs that I bought in the store. So now I think I'll set aside a dozen to age in the fridge for two weeks, then find out if that's old enough.

As I recently admitted, I have not been skilled at cooking dry beans. Buying beans in cans, if you eat a lot of beans, gets a bit expensive. Since I am in no way prepared to buy cheaper beer, I figured I better ease the grocery budget somewhere and start acting as poor as I actually am. My good friend Lisa (not the knitter) here in McMinnville gave me the opportunity to join a little co-op she belongs to that orders bulk food from a company here in Oregon. Buying bulk beans at thirty cents a pound is so cheap I decided it was time to learn my way around dried beans. It's been an embarrassment to be so lame in this way. EVERYONE CAN COOK BEANS FROM SCRATCH.

And I pride myself on being a pretty darn competent cook.

My friend Chelsea told me how to cook black beans:

You put a bunch of them in a pot (specific amount up to you), cover the beans with broth (about three inches above the beans), bring the broth to a boil, then turn the beans down to barely a simmer. Do something else like achieve world peace and knit baby booties. The beans will plump up in a couple of hours, not stick, not break apart, and will, in fact, be perfect.

It totally worked!

Though Chelsea already knows it, and she and I are very unsentimental steely women, I really miss her. We've had some good talks on the phone, but nothing beats getting together to cook. We met in a natal nautics class at the YMCA because we were the only two pregnant women there who weren't swimming in a great aura of unmitigated joy, we had to bond in order to survive the heat of their annoying glow. So we would grumble and swear our ungainly way through water exercises in which grown women are made to play with plastic "noodles". We've been close friends ever since.

A couple of smart ass curmudgeons cooking better food together than most restaurants serve. Bickering ever so slightly over the fact that Chelsea thinks it's ridiculous for me to ask her to write any of her brilliant recipes down because they're all right there in her head. Where I should be able to read them, no problem. Because I routinely pick people's brains with nifty spy tools designed especially for stealing secret recipes from chefs. The salad dressing I make all the time is one that I learned from her. (And forced her to put on paper.) Thank you Chelsea!!

Our kids are so lucky to have us.

So now I can cook black beans. I made my first batch into some black bean chili to put over Mexican rice which I also made for the first time. The rice was pretty tasty, but also mushy. I will try again, making adjustments.

I have a recipe for polenta lasagna that I will soon share. (Very easy on the waistline, in case you were wondering.)