Today I will talk about my latest food fusion foray as I combined elements of multiple recipes to make my own unique take on egg salad.
It was a fairly typical Sunday in our household; relaxing, picking up groceries, and trying to figure out what to feed our teenager for lunch. Aileen and I make separate grocery trips each week to two different stores. I buy supplies for my breakfasts and for the recipes I plan to cook for us the coming week, and she buys fruit, snacks, and things for her work lunches. We try to coordinate on who is buying what, but with the rest of life to worry about, we are not always successful. We also try not to buy more of the things that we already have, and are often equally unsuccessful at that. Well, today the stars aligned, and not in the good way. Let’s just say that we already had eggs…I bought eggs…she bought eggs, and we now have 5 dozen eggs!
With refrigerator space on a Sunday at a premium, we decided that we needed to take action. Ironically, we had been talking earlier in the day about what to make for lunch, and had thrown around the idea of egg-salad sandwiches. That is one of my son’s favorite sandwiches, and it certainly seemed like now was the right time for it. Per my usual, I could not let any cooking opportunity to go by without searching for some new and interesting recipe to try. As soon as I started looking at recipes with ingredients like curry powder and Dijon mustard, I quickly lost Aileen, and she went off to make her own tried and true standard recipe.
Left to my own devices, the results were predictable. I am physically incapable of cooking without making recipe adjustments. I quickly reviewed recipes from my two primary sources (America’s Test Kitchen and NYT Cooking), but nothing felt quite right; too boring, too many ingredients I didn’t have on hand. So what else could I do, but make a mashup of the best of each of the recipes? Food fusion at its finest. So here is what I came up with and I think it was pretty great!
To start with, I was intrigued by the Curried Egg Salad recipe from America’s Test Kitchen. I liked the idea of curry and Dijon, and the other ingredients just made sense. However, I was also intrigued by the NYT Cooking recipe of Egg Salad Sandwiches with Green Olive, Celery, and Parsley by David Tanis. I am a sucker for olives which I use very frequently in other recipes, and I liked the idea of having a little spice from the red-pepper flakes. My food fusion of these two recipes is as follows:
Food Fusion – Scott’s Curried Egg Salad with Olives
Servings: Approximately 2 1/2 cups (enough for 4 sandwiches)
Time: 15 minutes (assumes eggs already cooked)
Ingredients
6 large hard-boiled eggs, peeled and medium diced (see Notes)
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons red onion, minced
1/4 cup celery, chopped fine
1 tablespoon fresh cilantro leaves, minced (or 1 teaspoon dried)
1/2 cup green olives, chopped (plus extra to snack on while prepping – about 5 oz total)
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon curry powder
Pinch of red-pepper flakes (to taste)
Salt and pepper
Preparation
Mix all ingredients together in medium bowl. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Notes
You can cook hard-boiled eggs in an instant pot on a trivet with at least one cup of water. Cook on high pressure for 5 minutes, allow to natural release for 5 minutes, and then quick release. Place the eggs in an ice bath for 5 minutes and then peel.
Overall, I think it was pretty successful. I liked the briny taste of the olives, however I felt the flavor of the green olives (I used Calvestrano) was perhaps a bit too mild to stand up to the curry powder. Or, in the words of my son: “I didn’t like those green things.” I might consider trying kalamata olives next time. It also might be interesting to experiment with scallions versus the red onion, and if I had fresh parsley on hand I might try that as well. I hope you enjoyed the story and the recipe. 6 eggs down, 4 1/2 dozen to go! Stay tuned for more articles on how to create your own recipe.
The saying “when life gives you lemons…” first appeared in print in 1909 in Literary Digest when Christian anarchist Elbert Hubbard wrote: “A genius is a man who takes the lemons that Fate hands him and starts a lemonade-stand with them.”
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