Deviled Eggs

"Deviled eggs are so ding dang addictive. I love them!"

-- Ree Drummond, "The Pioneer Woman"

Deviled egg 12-9-14

"They held their hard-boiled eggs in one hand

and a piece of bread in the other, 

munching happily."

-- Enid Blyton, Five Go Off in a Caravan

I'm doing it again.

I'm waxing rhapsodic about eggs.

Shut the fuck up. It's my blog. I'll make sweet deviled egg love if I goddamn want to.

I'll eat eggs pretty much every which way, but deviled eggs are one of my all-time favorites. I don't make them all that often, so they always seem special when I do.

For lunch yesterday I made myself a deviled egg.

That's right, I made one. I did not make myself a bunch of deviled eggs, because if I make a bunch of deviled eggs, I will eat them all until they spew back up, and that is a terrible waste of good deviled eggs.

So I ate one. I enjoyed it. It was a good egg.

When you only have one deviled egg, you have to slow down and savor its textures, its flavors, its goodness.

Here's a confession, though. As much as I love deviled eggs, I do not enjoy eating other people's deviled eggs. 

I really only like my own.

Deviled eggs are a very personal thing for me. I like them the way I make them (which changes, depending on my mood.) And I like eating them the instant they are made because I don't like them cold from the fridge. I like them when they're still warm and soft, just barely cooled.

But that's my prerogative. Because they're my eggs. 

It seems like the only time you get offered other people's deviled eggs is on a funeral buffet or some church-lady picnic spread where they've been sitting out too long, and the tops are dried out and nasty looking (the eggs, not the church ladies). And there is always some shit of unknown provenance and origin in the filling. I don't want my yolks fucked up with crunchy shit like onions and celery and sweet pickle relish and paprika and, God forbid, canned tuna.

And don't get me started on the evils of Miracle Whip. I can't even.

(In my personal Hell, Miracle Whip is the only condiment.)

Anyway, when the deviled eggs are really good, which mine are, I don't like to share. I almost always make them just for myself, when there's nobody else at home. 

My current favorite deviled egg variation is a sort-of homage to sushi, with a tiny bit of wasabi in the filling and a sprinkle of black and white sesame seeds on top. 

You're lucky I even shared a picture. 

Lunch Notes

"Lunch hour is the loneliest hour of the day."

-- Charlie Brown

Lunch note 8-20-14

"At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period."

-- Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

School sucks.

For my son Leo, the sucking started today.

It's true, school can fill a kid with lots of good things. But we all know it can also force feed him a shitload of total ass-crap.

That's where lunch notes come in.

I pack Leo's lunch every day.

On many of those days, I tuck a small note in along with his sandwiches, chips and applesauce.

The food is how I try to feed him what he needs to keep going physically. But the notes are how I try to feed him a little shot of encouragement, or humor, or understanding, or nonsense, or whatever kind of boost he might be hungry for that day.

In the middle of a long hard day packed with information, and peer pressure, and cliques, and competition, and grades, and questions, and hormones, and overheated classrooms and uncomfortable desks, a lunch note reminds a kid that someone outside the building is thinking about him and loves him.

The lunch note is a tiny thing, but it's a very good thing. On some school days it might be the only good thing that happens to a kid.

You can't eat them, and I don't think they're on Mrs. Obama's healthier school lunch agenda.

But they should be.

If you ask me, little lunch notes should be a required part of every kid's daily diet.

They're soul food.

Packing the Last Lunch Of The School Year

"What sort of lunch is in that lunchbox?"

-- Winnie the Pooh, 

The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh

Leo's full lunchbox 6-2-14

"The practice of doing more than necessary works best

 when packing lunch boxes."

-- Josh Stern,

And That's Why I'm Single: 

What Good is Having a Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt 

When The Horse Is Still Attached?

According to Leo, the lunches I pack for him every day are a little bit legendary in the school cafeteria.

He says I've gotten mad  props from a few of his friends who look covetously at what he brings to eat.

I should get props. I pack great lunches.

These ain't no PB&J and an apple lunches, either. You won't find any lame-ass Lunchables in there. And with all due respect to Mrs. Obama, the school's "healthier" lunch isn't anywhere near good enough to feed to my boy -- it's not tasty enough, it's not healthy enough, and most of all, it's just not big enough.

A lunch like that might feed a third grader, but it won't cut the mustard with a 6' 1", 210 lb. slab of rock-solid, hungry muscle that burns through food like a coal furnace.

Leo's typical lunch, on any given day, includes two thick sandwiches layered with lean ham, turkey and chicken with lettuce and mayo on whole wheat, a protein bar, mixed nuts, applesauce, yogurt, homemade hummus with sliced carrots, a meat stick, and fresh fruit (usually strawberry slices or 2 or 3 clementine oranges.)  I pack it in as tight as I can, filling every square inch of available space. Toss in a plastic spoon, a napkin, and a bottle of water in the outside pocket and the whole thing weighs in at about five pounds, give or take.

I can pack a lot of love into a lunchbox.

I do this routine five nights a week. I even did it when Leo missed so many days of school due to winter weather closings. I kept packing his lunches, just in case. And if school was closed, he just ate lunch out of his lunchbox at our dinner table.

I'm happy to feed my growing son a healthy lunch that he can enjoy. But there comes a time, like now, when packing a lunch just feels like one more thing I have to do. So with the long school year finally winding to a close, I'm looking forward to a much-needed reprieve from the tyranny of the lunchbox.

I'm not complaining, I'm just saying sometimes it feels really good to get a break.

Of course I'll still have to feed Leo all summer. So, of course I'll still be making his lunches. But I won't have to stuff it all into little plastic zip-bags and pack it up the night before or realize at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night that I forgot to make hummus.

And in the summer, we can eat lunch together, which is the part I like best. Lunchtime is a pretty lonely affair for me most days.

Now I get to sit at the cool kids' table with that really hot guy. The big one with all the muscles. Yeah, him.

I hope he talks to me.

A Grown Up Lunch Date

"I'm not making art, I'm making sushi."

-- Masaharu Morimoto

Play Doh sushi 5-11-14

My, how times have changed.

When my son Sam was little, a "lunch date" usually meant a fast food kids' meal and a trip to the toy store.

Now that he's all grown up (he turns 19 tomorrow), Sam's tastes have matured, a lot. Yesterday, we had a perfectly lovely lunch date at a sushi restaurant (his choice), followed by some upscale shopping to replenish his work/school wardrobe.

He wears a suit and tie to work and classes nearly every day, so he needed some new dress shirts and shoes.

Way back when, he'd have balked at the merest mention of dreaded clothes shopping. Now he shops like a pro. He knows exactly what he needs, goes in and gets it, has membership benefits and coupons that slice the final tally in half and then shave 40 percent off that. I just tag along, try to keep up, stand back and watch him work, and help carry his shopping bags.

As for the sushi, of course there was a day when, like most little kids, he preferred hamburgers and french fries with a toy in the box. He wouldn't have touched raw fish with a pair of ten foot chopsticks. Now, he gets positively giddy over the prospect of yellowtail sashimi and a rainbow roll.

It's Mother's Day today, and while I do sometimes miss the days when my boys were little and wish I could pick them up and hold them one more time, I also love where they both are now -- young men, confident and capable and becoming who they're meant to be. Naturally, with growth comes change, changes in what they do, what they like, and even what they eat.

I'm not opposed to change. I'm intrigued by it, actually. And I hope I'm the kind of mother who'll never interfere with either of my boys "becoming." I'd much rather tag along as an observer and watch the fascinating metamorphosis unfold.

God forbid I should ever stand in the way of such a good and beautiful thing.

An Ordinary Lunch On Fine China

"Life's short. Use the fine china."

-- Colin Wright, exilelifestyle.com

PB&J on white, on Royal Stafford  3-15-14

"My mother's a genius. 

She just kept feeding me art on whatever we had;

paper plates, silver platter, didn't matter.

You know, she just kept feeding it to me."

-- Jill Scott

I try not to eat lunch over the kitchen sink.

Usually I sit at the table like a big girl.

On Fridays, though, I like to eat lunch sitting in my husband's recliner, with my feet up, watching a recorded episode of my favorite TV show. It's one of my little indulgences. 

I kicked the indulgence up a notch yesterday and plated my lunch (egg white omelet with zucchini, bell pepper and micro-watercress) on the good china. We have nine place settings of Noritake "Brook Hollow" gold-rimmed Japanese bone china that we got as wedding gifts. It lives hidden away in the back of a dark cupboard, zipped up in quilted, padded protective cases. We use in once in a blue moon -- maybe a total of 10 times (a generous estimate) in our 25 years of marriage.

I cook omelets exactly like this one all the time, but I thought this omelet looked so lovely -- way too lovely for scarfing over the sink -- that I broke out one of the pretty plates. I even used a fancy fork. I still sat in the recliner and watched Thursday night's recorded episode of Project Runway: Under the Gunn. But you know what? With a fancier plate and a fancier fork, my usual Friday lunch tasted even better somehow. Maybe it's because I slowed down and actually tasted it for a change.

Pretty as my omelet was on it's pretty plate, it didn't really photograph that well. So the sandwich in today's photograph was actually Leo's after school snack, peanut butter and jelly on a plate of antique Royal Stafford "Garland" hand-painted English bone china. He usually gobbles a protein bar right from the wrapper, or extra crunchy Jif on Ritz crackers on a paper plate. I was still in my post-fancy-lunch afterglow, so I thought why not let him in on it. This delicate little blue plate is one I got from my grandma. (It's a saucer, actually, with a matching teacup that also lives in a dark cupboard.) His sandwich may not look very tough on it's prim, dainty plate. But after eating it, Leo went to football weightlifting and squatted a personal best 405 pounds. Just sayin'.

The reasons I don't reach for the good china more often have nothing to do with whether I like it or not. I do. I chose it for my wedding gift registry, after all. My reason is practical. Simply put, bone china can't go in the dishwasher, and hand-washing all those breakable dishes is a real bitch. 

But washing a single plate is no sweat. It was a pleasure, actually. And after I washed it, I stacked it with its mates, zipped it into it's little quilted sleeping bag and tucked it away back in its dark cupboard. Except this time I rearranged things slightly, moving the plates from the back to the front of the cupboard, just in case I want to use one again next Friday. 

Who knows? This could become a regular thing. A regular good thing.