David's blog: 200708

Wednesday, August 1st, 2008

	This evening my nephew Carl and I did a typically American summer thing, namely go to a ball game, the Dayton Dragons vs. the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers. The game was actually fairly fun, almost a shutout but Rattlers managed to get one run in the top of the 9th, not enough to save them however against the Dragon's 8 runs, several of which were home runs. The Dragons mascots Heater and Gem had various fun activities on the field between innings. And of course there was food. We started with ice cream dots on the theory that life is short so you should eat dessert first and also on the premise that the rule about having to eat something green in order to get dessert is suspended at ballgames. We did end up having something green though — cotton candy.

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

This evening was my church council's summer potluck. Food, of course, is important at churches, and our church is no exception. In fact, food's so important that we're putting together a 10th anniversary cookbook to collect recipes for the various good things we've had to eat over the life of the church. Since the council was gathering this evening to eat together, our cookbook coordinator had us prepare items from submitted recipes for testing and for photographing. I made Mexican deviled eggs.
	The first thing to know about making deviled eggs, Mexican or otherwise, is how to make hard boiled eggs, and the first thing to know about making hard boiled eggs is not to use extremely fresh eggs because if you do, you'll have a devil of a time peeling them. You want eggs that are at least a week old. So you have to plan ahead a bit to make deviled eggs, and not having done so, I had no eggs on hand, week old or otherwise. But a great thing about the apartment building in which I live is that they have a little convenience store, and so yesterday (I did plan ahead a little) I was able to buy some old expensive eggs, $0.99 per half dozen, expiration date 8/3. Perfect age-wise, if not price-wise, because they were still fairly fresh but old enough to be easy to peel. I boiled them yesterday evening, gave them a quick cooldown afterwards under running cold water and then stuck them in the fridge to peel today. I stopped by Krogers later yesterday evening to get some more eggs, not for this recipe but to have some more on hand and out of curiosity as to how old the other eggs were. The eggs I bought at Kroger had an expiration date of 8/21, about 2 1/2 weeks out, which means the eggs I bought at my building's store had been sitting around about that long. Also, the Kroger eggs cost $0.99 per dozen, meaning my building's store's markup is 100%. Ah, well, you do have to pay for convenience. Though I took some pics today at various stages in the preparation of my deviled eggs, I'm not going to give you the recipe — if you want that or the recipe for anything else you see, you'll have to buy the cookbook. I will tell you that Mexican deviled eggs have salsa, mayonnaise, sour cream and cheddar cheese in them.