A man’s got to know his limitations

Happy Easter!  I’m categorizing this post under the spirituality portion of the blog, not the bee part, but maybe it’ll bring a smile to your face.

One of my favorite things about Easter is getting to eat deviled eggs.  My son, Patrick and I are deviled egg gourmands.  If we see one, we have to eat it.  On Easter Sunday, at the reception after church, there are usually some on the table.  However, we’re not the only ones who savor them and if you dilly-dally in the sanctuary at the end of the service, by the time you get to the fellowship hall, they’ll be gone.  Today, we were lingering a bit and thought we’d miss out, but in the end, we timed it perfectly to get there when a new plate was put on the table.  Score!

Recently, while perusing Facebook or one of my favorite blogs (not sure where), I saw a new (to me) twist on deviled eggs where you make little chicks out of the eggs instead of just slicing them in half.  Since I couldn’t remember where I had seen these, I scoured the internet and found that this is not a new idea.  Where had they been hiding all my life?  We’re going over to Patrick’s girlfriend’s family’s house for Easter dinner and I thought, “Hey, I could make those!”.    I settled on the recipe I found at the “A Thrifty Mom” website although I gleaned some info from other sites.

Deviled Egg Chicks

The recipe seemed simple enough, so I bought a bunch of eggs and hard boiled them.  That was by far the easiest part.  Then, I had to peel them.  Peeling eggs is great when the shell comes off in big chunks.  Mine didn’t.  And, as anyone knows, sometimes when you peel hard boiled eggs, parts of the egg come off with the shell.  Fortunately, only one had that problem, so Patrick gets an extra egg.   I know that some people will tell me some great recipe for boiling eggs that doesn’t have these problems, but I’ve tried them all, and there’s always one or two eggs that don’t follow the norm.

Then it came time to disassemble the eggs to get the yolk out.  You cut a little slice off the big end so the egg will set flat, then cut the top third off and pull the yolk out.  I’m sure anyone that has had a hard boiled egg, knows that when you eat said egg, sometimes the yolk is in the middle, sometimes at the bottom, and sometimes at the top.  While I was slicing off the bottom bits, I ran into some yolks at the bottom.   I started thinking that this might be a problem, but kept on going.  When I started cutting off the top thirds, I rarely cut into a yolk or if I did, it was only a small part of it.  That meant I had to go digging around to get the yolk out with my nifty little lobster claw pick.  Turns out that eggs are kinda fragile (even when hard boiled) and don’t like to be dug into without splitting.   I figured in the end, that the filling would act as glue, except in the most extreme cases.

I made the filling and cut up a carrot for the noses per the directions.  However, I didn’t have any pickles for the eyes, so I took an idea from another site that said to use peppercorns.  However, peppercorns are kinda big, so I put my mill on a coarse setting and at least split them up a bit.  I used tweezers to put them on the chicks which ended up being sorta magnetic to all the other pepper bits, not just the big chunks I was aiming for. These seem to take up more filling than the halves because you have to fill the void, plus have some for the face.

The Good

I was laughing at myself most of the time I was putting these together and Clint Eastwood’s line in Magnum Force kept popping into my head.  I was way in over my head.

Out of 18 eggs, I got 14 that sorta look okay.  They remind me of Angry Birds and some of them are a bit sad.

Some of them came out okay.

The Bad and the Ugly

My goal of using the filling for glue only worked for those that had small splits in their sides.  Some of the others were beyond repair.   So, I used the little bit of filling to put on the tops and sides that I had left over.

Some did not.

I guess a little paprika would have made them a little more appealing, but when Patrick came out and saw them, the thought they looked like turds (which was my impression as well).  He still ate them anyway.

So, next year, I think it’s back to my standard recipe for eggs.   You get twice as many from each egg and you can hide your mistakes better.  However, I now know why The Thrifty Mom starts out with a dozen eggs, but always has fewer of the final product in her pictures.