It is time for me to get back to work on the book, which means that it’s time for me to think about eggs again, which thus means it’s time for me to share my ponderings with you. Lucky souls. 
I have read a lot about comfort cooking, the act of stepping into the kitchen and wrestling your demons to the ground whilst simmering a pot of something fragrant, or whapping the bejesus out of a bundle of peppercorns for steak au poivre, or discovering the Zen of jellymaking, as Debby Bull discovered, and about which she wrote so beautifully, in Blue Jelly: Love Lost and the Lessons of Canning. I have read it, from time to time I have even done it, and I believe wholeheartedly in it, but lately it has eluded me, rather like a slow-moving, splendiforous butterfly that hovers around your hand, only to fly over your head just as you are about to reach out and touch it. Except for the focaccia I baked at Snowball’s house, I haven’t made a loaf of bread in months. To make bread is to be reminded of better times, when I was writing my business plan for the bakery, when every loaf became a puzzle, one about which I could dream for hours: can we make 100 pounds of this dough and still have every loaf taste as good as this one does? I think about this time two years ago when I was getting ready to go to the two-week class in Vermont my friends and I referred to as Bread Camp. There is more Bread Camp in my future, but right now I can’t see it. It’s not just bread, either. My usual staples of kitchen ballet—hummus; black-eyed-pea hummus; corn cut off the cob and sauteed with butter, cayenne pepper and a splash of half-and-half; tomato and mozzarella salad; panzanelle; all manner of summer fruit tarts; plum cake; my beloved salad mix of sorrel, arugula and pea shoots—all of these things, which normally make me feel centered and graceful, now call up feelings of clumsiness and a sneaking suspicion that I’ve had a good run, but it’s time to pack up my gear and make way for someone *really* good.
Fortunately, I know self-pity when I smell it, and I know that a) this is nothing more than a mild rut, and b) nothing jolts one out of a mild rut than either trying something completely new or revisiting something you haven’t made in a long time. This week, I was lucky enough to do both.
Those of you who eat hard-boiled eggs for breakfast regularly may become a bit impatient at my fussing over them, but understand, please, that I thought I had eaten my lifetime quota of boiled eggs when I was 14. That was the year I went on a ludricrous crash diet, created by a leading bariatrician of the 1970’s and 1980’s and published in a teen magazine. For two weeks I had a hard-boiled egg for breakfast; plain water-packed tuna, sans mayo or any other form of dressing, on a bed of greens for lunch, another boiled egg and an orange for dinner. I lost a tremendous amount of weight and turned into a moody, lethargic monster, as if I weren’t doing well enough on that score with adolescence alone. I ate so many boiled eggs that the thought of ever eating one again made my stomach roll over. To this day, I’m still very picky about egg salad, which is to say that I won’t eat it unless Lloyd makes it. Lloyd makes dreamy egg salad. But I’m getting away from myself. I had thought my boiled egg days were behind me, until I read a New York Times article that casually mentioned salade Nicoise. I didn’t know that salade Nicoise was just what we needed, but I knew that I wanted some right now.
We were in good shape. We had tomatoes. We had capers. We had butter lettuces from the Greenmarket. We had jar upon jar of Italian olive-oil-packed tuna that I bought to ensure that Lloyd would not go hungry while I was in Arkansas. “See,” I’d said to him, “you can mix this with some oriechette and chickpeas and olive oil and lemon juice and it will be great.” “Sounds great,” Lloyd said, and then spent a month eating something else. We even had anchovies, although I knew that Lloyd would probably enjoy the salad more if I gave the anchovies a miss this time around. All I needed were the eggs. I snagged two from the fridge, covered them with water, brought them slowly to the boil, turned off the heat, covered the pot and let them sit for 10 minutes. I’ll let Lloyd have the eggs, I said to myself.
At 10 minutes, I took them out, ran them under cool water, tapped them gently on the counter, rolled them between my palms to crackle the shell a bit, and peeled them. The shell came off cleanly, no pulls into the white, and I realized I’d forgotten what a satisfying task this was, shelling hardboiled eggs. The egg itself had none of the throat-catching sulfurousness that comes from overcooking an egg; instead, it gave off a deeply savory, buttery, clean scent that just sang egg. With my first bite of the egg, I was filled with the urge to make the egg sauces so prominently featured in my old English cookbooks, the cooked yolks used as a liaison for the other ingredients, the whites used to contribute flavor and texture. If Lloyd and I weren’t headed to Philadelphia this weekend, you’d better believe I’d be in the kitchen, rolling eggs two at a time, one under each palm, hearing the crackle and sighing, deeply, on the inside.
So where does the “something completely new” come in? That would come from the interesting new rice I bought on Saturday, the kind that taught me what a beautiful thing a plain bowl of rice can be, and what an even more beautiful thing that bowl of rice is when you combine it with tiny, perfectly-seasoned black lentils. Yes, there is a recipe. Or there will be, anyway. Tomorrow, possibly.
Edit: After posting this, I discovered that my pal C. JoDI at Journal of the Demographically Insignificant was Page Hit #30,000 here at PTMYB. Those of you with more seniority than I have, what is the appropriate way to thank him for this? Does one buy a bottle of wine? Bake a cake? Hire a stripper? Thanking everyone in advance for their advice.