photo by Forrest Cavale
I have always liked poached eggs. They are these beautiful, bright-white pearls of breakfast goodness, with this brilliant, yellow, sunny inside, just waiting to be burst with a fork tine and soaked up on toast. They truly are magnificent.
I have tried to make a poached egg many a time, only to end up with a grotesque scramble of pasty-boiled egg tendrils. Ugh. You eat first with your eyes and that is nasty. Time after time, the watery mess took my beautiful breakfast dreams and turned them into into fetid tentacled nightmares. I’ve had so many fails on the poached egg, that the idea of trying again would literally make me nervous. I reserved it for a special treat at restaurants and just decided I was not cut out for making poached eggs. Did you hear that? I was scared of an egg. An egg!
At least that’s how it used to be.
A couple of months ago, I’m not sure how I ended up there, but I landed myself on this How to Poach an Egg blog post, and the poached-egg-fire was re-lit. I went all out. I invited everyone I know over to my house and made five-dozen poached eggs over three brunch sessions. Okay, not really. All I really did, is made one humble little poached egg for breakfast each day, until poached eggs magically transformed into something mysterious that only can be made by restaurant professionals, into my favorite cozy breakfast that I relish each morning. And just like that, I took this thing that had always stoked my feelings of kitchen-failure and worthless-egg-cookery and now, I am its Master. It’s pretty cool.
For Christmas, my hubby bought me this gluten-free cookbook I’d been wanting. It is full of delicious goodies: bread loaves that look like actual bread; bagels that promise to be chewy; scones that are magically sconey; and potstickers… actual potstickers!! If you have any sort of dietary restriction, or say, anything you regularly deprive yourself because you know it’s not good for you–cigarettes, sugar, People magazine, whatever–imagine They came up with a healthy version of it and They said,
“Look, for only twice the price of the (insert your pleasure here) that are bad for you, you can get ones that are sweet-smelling, will lower your cholesterol and will floss your teeth for you.”
The only catch is that every time, for the last nine years, that you have consumed these particular products, 80% of the time you’ve spent more money on something that was a big-huge-sucky disappointment. Then… along comes this cookbook and dammit, you are going to master it. Like the poached egg, you will rise high above your sucky-disappointments and you will do it. You will become Master once again!! Come yeast – I will make you rise. In this god-forsaken, high-altitude, dehydrated, snowy state, I will bring you to your place of purpose and you will leaven my bread. My gluten-free, delicious bread.
If you are still with me (if you’re not, I apologize, I just get really excited about the bread), here is the point. There are these little things in life that scare us. Be it a poached egg, or that stupid bottle of yeast in your fridge. Maybe it is saying you’re sorry to someone or asking someone out. Whatever it is, big or little, there is a risk-taking muscle in our bodies, and it needs to be exercised. Once we start using it, it gets stronger and stronger. We go from making poached eggs, to baking bread. Who knows – maybe next year I’ll be surfing! And all these little risks, these things that we want to do, but we avoid: once we accomplish them, we make room for bigger things. We make room for more life.
So… go on! Do that thing. I promise you’ll like it.
Poached eggs, photo courtesy of Luke Honey