Eggs

My mom does not cook. Most of what I remember about her culinary repertoire involves the following: boiling frozen dumplings, microwaving leftovers from my Grandma’s, steaming and reheating buns from Din Tai Fung, home of the world’s best dim sum.

It’s not so much that she can’t cook – she makes a great chilled peanut soup, which she would always serve to my friends when they came over to hang out. It’s just that she never bothered, probably because she was too engrossed in her work. Plus leftovers from my Grandma generally tasted awesome so it wasn’t like we were eating poorly.

The only time she’d ever cook for my sister and I was breakfast, on the weekends – and every weekend, I could expect to eat two eggs to start my day. Some day it was two sunny-side up eggs with soy sauce on them; other days it was two scrambled eggs with buttered toast. I remember being mesmerized that the same white spherical object could turn into a multitude of things when prepared differently. Eggs can be hard-boiled, soft-boiled, fried, scrambled, poached, baked, and god knows how many other forms of prep I’m missing here^1.

“Teach me how to make eggs,” I would tell my mom over and over again. But then I’d balk at the suggestion that we make eggs for breakfast the next weekend when she suggested it. I was scared senseless that somehow when I went to make eggs instead of my mom something terrible would happen and everything would go to shit.

Eggs – in particular, scrambled eggs – are next to impossible to screw up. All you have to do is make sure you don’t leave a healthy dose of eggshell crumble in your eggs, and don’t leave them on the stovetop so long that they fuse with your pan. That’s really about it. But the first time I did it myself – mixed the yolk with the white, sprinkled some salt and pepper in it, poured it into the pan, let the mixture set, broke it up and scrambled it with the spatula, and finally, plated the eggs – I thought I was a top chef extraordinaire. Of course I did – it was the first thing I had ever made in my life. I was so proud of the fact that I could make scrambled eggs².

That’s really what kick started my interest in cooking – after that; I started reading more and more about food until finally I started cooking on a regular basis this year. Even today, eggs remain a major staple of what I eat and cook. I’ll put an egg on anything and everything – corned beef hash, burgers, pasta, steak, fried rice, scallion pancakes, and more. And when I’m too lazy to make real food, I always revert back to eggs and breakfast food to whip something up quick – couple slices of bacon, some toast, two fried eggs, and a glass of OJ make for some killer hangover food at 1 pm in the afternoon.

My dalliance with eggs are far from being over, either – I still have plans to figure out how to poach eggs perfectly, and to make Eggs Benedict sometime soon (though the béarnaise sauce is somewhat daunting). I still need to figure out how to flip an egg without a spatula to make eggs over easy that don’t have broken yolks, and to make omelets that actually look appetizing instead of having them turn into scrambles all the time. There’s a lot more to tackle and learn when it comes to eggs, the most basic of foods to cook – and I plan on figuring it all out, and then some, as I cook my way through my first year of being a real person.

---

^{1. This doesn’t include the millions of recipes that call for eggs in some form, or the fact that eggs can also be thrown at cars, people, and houses for much hilarity. ↩}

^{2. This would be the only thing I could make until halfway through my freshman year in college, when I boiled pasta for the first time. Unaware the water had to be boiling, I left the heat on medium and waited for 30 minutes before my pasta was remotely edible.↩}