Ode to an Egg or Several

The perfect way to hard-cook an egg is to first chill it, then plunge your cold egg into a pot of boiling water, return to a gentle boil for 11 minutes, after which immediately plunge the egg into cold water to limit carryover cooking. The shells will peel off with almost no effort. The whites will be solid but not at all rubbery or tough. The first few millimeters of yolk will be hard-cooked, surrounding a firm but soft-cooked center. A younger me would have been repulsed by the mere idea of an egg yolk that wasn't cooked firm and solid all the way through, but with my years of experience, I can now assure him, objectively speaking, this is the perfectly hard-cooked egg.

Some argue that as we mature our palettes become more refined. I think what actually happens is you simply start to like, and even favor, disgusting food. There is no reality in which a jar of salted anchovies in oil is somehow better food stuff than, let's say, Buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing. And yet, given the choice, I'd pick the anchovies nine times out of ten. Let this be a warning to you kids. One day, you will find yourself delighting in the decadence of a heaping serving of full-fat cottage cheese, the plain kind, if you can call full-fat plain, eating your curds out of a little bowl, probably a simple yet elegant white ceramic number, and you'll come to wonder when it was, precisely, that you became so gross.

Life is largely unavoidable.