Miz Jo won’t let me help her cook anymore until I take a remedial course in math.
Particularly fractions. We had been invited toChristmas Day dinner at our granddaughter’s house. She has the youngest “great” in the family. We wanted to see how Presley reacted to her first Christmas morning.
When we have a big meal at one of the kid’s houses, Jo and I pitch in and cook something to add to the table. I usually get relegated to a ham. I make mine like Mama did, with pineapple loops and cherries on it. But Jo’s specialty is deviled eggs.
It’s always a problem to try to figure out how many deviled eggs to make. Usually, people will eat at least two. But we have some grandkids that will make a meal of the eggs alone.
It’s always a problem to try to figure out how many deviled eggs to make. Usually, people will eat at least two. But we have some grandkids that will make a meal of the eggs alone. We had been told there would probably be about 15 people there that day. Well, calculating eggs, that’s automatically 30 eggs, so everybody can have at least two. Knowing some people would want three, I said we ought to figure on making at least 40. And at the last minute I threw in 10 more eggs, so we would have enough. I figured 50 deviled eggs should easily take care of 15 people.
So, I brought 50 eggs to a big, rolling boil and then took them off the heat to stand for 15 minutes in the hot water to finish cooking. Then I poured the hot water into the sink and ran cold water out of the tap over the eggs. Jo and I then set about cracking and peeling the 50 eggs. (I STILL haven’t figured out why some eggs skin right out of their shells and others absolutely refuse. Any tips on peeling boiled eggs, please email me before Easter. My email is at the bottom of this article.)
Anyway, it was only after Jo and I had boiled 50 eggs, and cooled them and cracked them and peeled them, and I had picked up the first shelled egg and got the pairing knife and brought the knife up to the egg to slice it in half, that I realized, we weren’t making 50 deviled eggs. We were making a hundred! Because every whole egg makes two halves!
At that point it dawned on me that I either needed to cook more often or just stay out of the kitchen altogether. But whichever, I’ll never make that mistake again.
But 100 deviled eggs weren’t too many after all. First, they looked nice on the tray. And when the eight-year-old put five on her plate right away I figured the doubled-buffer-number-of-eggs might have been providence watching out for me.
As we head into the uncharted New Year, it is a comforting thought to me that, if providence takes care of little things like how many deviled eggs we really need, then the big things will probably be taken care of, too.
Happy New Year!
