An Explosion of Bad Cooking

I’ve been having some trouble getting to sleep the past few weeks. Once I fall asleep, I sleep wonderfully, but actually getting to sleep has been difficult. As you might suspect, this tends to lead to a certain degree of difficulty in getting up the next morning, which means rushing through Wylie’s morning walk, eating a very quick breakfast, and praying that there haven’t been any accidents between home and the office. (Even during the summer, someone having the most minor of mechanical difficulties can back traffic up for 20 miles. During the school year, it’s a good day when the sea of brake lights only goes back 20 miles.)
So on Thursday night I decided to plan ahead and made a few hard-boiled eggs. Not the most filling breakfast, but combine it with a bit of milk and perhaps a granola bar and it’ll do the trick.
A couple hours later, just as I was getting ready to go to bed, there was an explosion in the kitchen. While I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on, another egg exploded, this time knocking the lid off the pan.
I’ll bet you didn’t know eggs would explode that way either, did you?

4 thoughts on “An Explosion of Bad Cooking”

  1. Do you mean that you boiled the eggs for two hours? There’s a Chinese technique for hard-cooking eggs that takes 5 hours, but not by boiling! Yikes!
    Did you know that you don’t have to keep the water boiling to properly cook the eggs? Once the water comes to a boil, turn off the heat and leave the pan covered for 15 minutes. No helmet or flak jacket required.
    One last question: How did you sleep Thursday night after the explosion?

  2. Yes, at least two hours. It wasn’t intentional, just forgot about ‘em. Ironically, the explosions came right after the end credits of Ratatouille, a movie about (among other things) cooking.
    Nope, I didn’t know you could turn off the heat once it was boiling. Truth is, I have no idea how long you’re supposed to cook ‘em, so the odds are that even when I don’t explode ‘em, my eggs are still seriously overcooked.
    I’m not sure what time it was when I finally dozed off on Thursday night/Friday morning. Probably no earlier than 3:30.
    When you consider that this is the fourth time in less than 12 months that I’ve let a pan boil dry, it’s really quite amazing that anyone lets me anywhere near a kitchen anymore.
    Although really, using them as eggsplosive devices, that’s really kinda neat!

  3. Timers, I never cook without them. 🙂 Although that does take away half the fun…
    My excitement earlier this year was putting a glass baking dish on an electric burner that I hadn’t yet turned off. You can imagine the popping noise from it snapping in half and then the joy of cleaning up the glass shards…

  4. Ditto on the timers… and eggs should be boiled 11-14 minutes, starting when the water comes to a boil. After it does, drop the heat and let it simmer, or go with the full time and turn it off as Z. says. But you’d still need to go drain them and put them in the fridge at some point (unless you like warm/room temp boiled eggs, ick).

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