You have a lot of eggs to use up...
Make egg salad!
Last year, I had the great opportunity of working as a recipe tester on The Lemonade Cookbook. Lemonade is an awesome chain of restaurants in Los Angeles. The cookbook is full of delicious recipes for salads, sandwiches, braises, desserts, and lemonades.
I learned a lot of interesting tricks and ideas while testing the recipes for the book. One thing that I have permanently adopted is Lemonade's technique for making egg salad. For their egg salad, you separate the yolks from the whites, make a sauce with the yolks, chop up the whites, and fold the whites into the sauce. Making it this way makes the salad a beautiful yellow golden color. The texture is also smoother, and less clumpy than regular egg salad.
This recipe uses their technique, with slightly different ingredients. I love lemon, but if you don't like lemon, omit it (Lemonade adds pickle juice instead). The yellow mustard enhances the yellow color of the dish, but if you don't like the flavor of mustard just skip it. If you omit lemon or mustard, add more mayo. This egg salad can be made a 100 different ways.
Fancy Egg Salad
Serves 4
Ingredients
6 large eggs
3 tablespoons yellow mustard
1 tablespoon whole grain mustard
1/3 cup mayo (Best Foods/Hellmann's)
1 tablespoon capers, drained and chopped
1/2 a small shallot, minced fine
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped fine (you could use chives or green onions here instead)
Pinch of salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Directions
Put your eggs in a medium sized pot, and fill the pot with enough water to just cover the tops of the eggs. Bring the water to a boil. Turn the heat off and cover the pot with a lid. Leave the eggs in the hot water for 15 minutes. While the eggs are cooking, prepare an ice bath in a large bowl (ice + water). After 15 minutes, place the eggs into the ice bath. This will stop the eggs from cooking longer, and it will make them easier to peel.
While the eggs are cooling, prepare the ingredients for the salad. Mince the shallot, parsley, and capers and reserve.
Once the eggs have cooled a bit, peel them. Carefully, cut the eggs in half. Remove the egg yolks and place them in a bowl. Roughly chop the egg whites and reserve.
To the egg yolks add the mustards, mayo, capers, shallot, lemon juice, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Using a fork or a whisk, mix all of the ingredients until they are combined and fairly smooth. If you're super fancy, use a food processor. By hand, my yolk mixture wasn't perfectly smooth, but that didn't matter much to me.
With a spatula, gently fold the egg whites into the yolk mixture.
Voila! You have super yummy, beautiful-looking egg salad. Put it on a sandwich, serve it with good crackers (I love Mary's), or just eat it as is!
