Boiling Potatoes and Eggs

I thought I would try a homemade potato salad for dinner. We didn't have any potato salad dressing so I just mixed up some mayonnaise and lemon juice for the dressing. That's what Taste.com.au told me to do. Technically, this is an easy salad to whip up. I just had minor problems with the boiled egg I was adding to the salad.

I was supposed to boil the potatoes and add the dressing onto the potato while it was still warm. That way the potato absorbs the flavor in. But when my potato was cooked, my eggs were still not done. Who knew it took more than five minutes to boil an egg? I had managed to crack one of them when putting them in the pan and when I checked it, it was still a bit soft. I had to again put some water to boil and boil the eggs for another five minutes to harden them.

I knew there were a lot of theories around boiling eggs. I remember listening to a conversation on the radio or TV, where they were having a quite passionate discussion about how to boil an egg. And it is not as simple as it sounds. I had thought it took only about three minutes, and had left it for five minutes just to make sure. But after looking up on how to boil an egg on a few websites, I see that I had done quite a few things wrong.
Wikipedia gives the run down of the theories behind boiling eggs. Some say you put the egg in cold water and then put it to heat, while others say that you boil the water first and then put the eggs in. All the other websites I checked was consistent in asking us to do the former. I had done the latter.

It was also important that we make sure that the eggs are in room temperature. I had just taken mine out of the refrigerator.

A Sydney chef, Brahimi reckons that the eggs should be covered with water when they boil. Half of the water had evaporated in my pan and they were only half covered. I did, however, run cold water on the eggs to make the peeling of eggs a bit easier, as he had recommended. I did not burn my fingertips at the process.

Mr. Breakfast said that we are supposed to let the eggs simmer in for about 12 minutes! I had no patient to let that happen for I had already struggled with boiling the egg for about 10 minutes. You can apparently just leave the eggs in hot water for about 10 minutes as well. I think that's where Mr. Breakfast is coming from.

After all this, it is pretty straight froward. Peeling the egg is the fun part. As long as you have not over cooked the egg, the shell comes off easily. A little tip: make sure you stir the egg when it is boiling in the pan, this helps the egg yolk to be in the center when it boils (I had forgotten to do this as well that day).

As for the potato salad dressing, I tasted it after I mixed in all my ingredients. At first it tasted a bit weird, maybe it was too much lemon juice or the dried basil I put in (I think it was either Maggie Beer or Nigella Lawson, or both, who always insists on fresh herbs and now I do know why). But I after I left the salad to rest, the taste was good and we had none leftover.
And for anyone who is curious about boiling an egg, here are the websites I looked into:

http://www.mrbreakfast.com/ask.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_egg

http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/crack-the-formula-on-boiling-eggs/2006/03/28/1143441128413.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12504/how+to+boil+an+egg

Experimenting with recipes

My first ever cookbook was this massive book called the 'All Colour Cookbook'. It is a fabulous book! It has over 300 recipes with illustrated instructions and colour pictures of all the dishes. I cannot remember the number of times I have poured over it, picturing the recipes I would make and what a perfect meal would be. It was, back then, the most comprehensive and inexhaustible cookbook I had seen. And thinking about how heavy it is, I am surprised to say that it has managed to make its way from Maldives to Australia.

I never thought of actually cooking it until my Dad one day decided to try out 'Queen of Puddings'. It had seemed to be the most complicated recipe we had ever seen. My Dad did most of the cooking, and he managed to get a lot of it wrong. I vaguely remember him forgetting to strain the orange zest and the meringue fell flat. The second time he made it, it didn't quite turn out well either. I think it was the meringue again.

My Dad's struggle with this recipe gave me a bit of inspiration to get this recipe right. The best thing about making Queen of Puddings was when I mix the milk, orange zest and butter together, it has an exquisite smell. As simple as it sounds, to this day, I always take a moment to take a deep breath and smell it.

I knew I had mastered the Queen of Puddings when I saw the meringue standing up in magnificent peaks. I sometimes still mess up the meringue, but have come a long way from those days when I would be whipping and whipping the egg whites and wonder why nothing was happening (half the time, it was because I put in too much sugar too soon).

This book has given me many failed recipes, including Floating Island, which to this day, my cousin calls Sinking Island. Not only did I not get the meringue to peak, but made the milk to curd while making the custard. At least I think that was what it was. The custard had little grainy bits in it. The second time I made it, I got the beautiful chunks of meringue needed but my Mom had to try and salvage the custard by adding some custard powder.

The best was the Surprise Souffle my uncle and I attempted to make. Neither of us had any idea what a souffle was, and made it in a cake tin! It tasted fine, but it was definietly not a souffle. More like a savory mushroom cake.

A few years on from numerous cooking mistakes, I am still ploughing on with new recipes. From the three hour chocolate tart and a white chocolate tart which had the most awful too sweet taste in the filling when I tasted it while making it. I was super nervous as well, because I was making this to take it to a dinner party, but somehow turned out really well. People kept commenting on how good it was and when I finally tasted it, I surprised myself. I still cannot figure out how that had happened.