• 6 hard-cooked eggs, diced
• 1/2 cup diced celery
• 2-1/2 Tbsp mayonnaise
• 1 Tbsp vinegar
• 1/4 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp salt (or to taste)
• 1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/8 tsp pepper

Cooking hard “boiled” eggs are something most people seem to think involves tossing some eggs in a pot of boiling water for a while, then drain rinse & peel, but to make good hard-cooked eggs, which should be the goal if you actually are going to make your own or feed this to others who may care about what they eat, isn’t difficult. Or shouldn’t be, but it sort of is if you don’t know the science behind it. There are a lot of ways to mess it up, with off-colored yolks, overcooked, rubbery eggs, or ones that are difficult to peel. The worst thing ever is to make egg salad with a shell in it to break someone’s tooth on.

I’ve tried tons of different ways to do it, including Alton Brown’s and Cooking Illustrated‘s methods, which I usually trust to be the “best” way, since they go through the time and resources to test and scientifically examine the science behind cooking, which is all cooking is. Alton got his method from Shirley Corriher of Cookwise fame, who is an expert on such things. When you’re applying some type of heat to food, you’re performing science. And science is something that should be able to be repeated on a consistent basis by anyone with the right tools and ingredients.

What I’ve come to use, however, is something I found on clearance at Target, which is a steamer by Dash for about five bucks. I also tried using a microwave steamer that looks like a chicken, and another that cooks one egg at a time in the shape of an egg. The best, by far, is the Dash steamer. The one egg at a time plastic gizmo wrecked the eggs, and cooked them inconsistently. It wasn’t good for either recipes or just making a single egg to serve to my daughter, who loves to eat lightly salted hard-cooked eggs. Just the whites, though.

Eggs are interesting things, scientifically. A marvel of nature. Honey is another marvel of nature. I only recently learned, or should say realized, that farm fresh eggs don’t need to be refrigerated. If you wash and chill them in the refrigerator, though, you need to maintain the temperature. But eggs have a protective coating that keeps bacteria out and you can just keep them on the counter or wherever until needed. This is an article that explains it in some detail.

Some things I know about eggs that I find to be valuable knowledge: the base of the egg has an air pocket. And fresh eggs should have yolks that stand up tall when cracked into a pan, not flatten out. If the yolk just collapses, you have some not-so-fresh eggs. And I think the difference between whether the chicken egg is white or brown depends on the type of bird laying it. Also the opaque slimy thing in eggs is called the chalaise(sp), which is fun to say.