I recently flew to Mexico to see a man, I guess, and also to sit on a beach and read, and also to try to write, but that last bit didn’t happen so much thanks to a computer that broke upon arrival. Instead of writing things for money I learned how to slackline and I finished all of My Brilliant Friend, which is truly excellent beach reading, and I finally watched The Perks of Being A Wallflower (albeit dubbed), and then there’s the lime and egg thing, which is what we’re here to talk about today.
Even the most freshly hatched, locally snatched, orange-yolked egg* can feel a bit dour at times, particularly if you're medium- or hard-boiling it. I’ve been lifting weights and trying to eat more protein recently and honestly I’m getting a little bored of boiled eggs! Sure they are a nutritionally sound little snack that you can store in your fridge and yes they are easy to prepare and eat and boy are they cute but sometimes they feel like an obligation. Like a tastier vitamin, or a husky shrub of cauliflower. One time a beautiful recently married genius I know called raw cauliflower a "satisfyingly punishing snack" and she was right. Boiled eggs taste better than that but the effect can be the same. Fine if you disagree, but regardless, a squeeze of lime makes them pluckier and sweeter and more exciting, the acid rounds them out somehow, and how did nobody tell me about this earlier.
So here we are in a kitchen in Mexico, this friend and I, pulling out boiled eggs from his refrigerator to snack on before dinner, and I get myself all the way through a competent Spanish translation of “actually, it’s easier to peel an egg if you do it underwater!” just to be laughed at, ja ja. What’s the point, he said, I’m in no rush. Why should you care so much about pock marks on your boiled eggs, why should you worry so much about quickness. I know no accurate way to translate the phrase “life hack” and why would you want to, other than to explain that, where I come from, people brag about using a straw to poke the stem out of a strawberry.
So we sat and peeled our eggs onto torn bits of paper towels, wonky piles of scraps accumulating in front of us, gnarled eggs halved and spritzed with lime, sprinkled with salt, popped into mouths in singular swift motions. Him explaining that this was his preferred childhood snack, that here in Mexico we put lime and salt on everything. Why would eggs be any different. The yolks had those dark rings around them, sulfuric and Bad, which I somehow loved?, the same way I’d giggle any time he ate a hot dog plain and cold and vertical, like when people eat string cheese incorrectly. Sometimes it’s very nice when people care about something far less than you do, like putting food in your mouth, or peeling an egg.
He laughed at me again after lighting a cigarette and ashing it in a particularly large fragment of upturned shell. See, he smiled, if I’d peeled it your way I wouldn’t have this ashtray. There’s a sleepy romantic luxury in someone smoking a cigarette in a kitchen. The night before when I mentioned my computer not turning on he’d said something about how women never take good care of their cars but we’ll gloss over that, because when you tell stories it’s more fun to focus on the dumb satisfaction of sliding a plain cheese quesadilla from a frying pan onto the plate of a shirtless hunk while frogs loudly chirp outside the window than it is to discuss the banal specifics of sitting alone on a foreign island wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life. (When will the cycle of silently begging other people to give you more of themselves end?) Of course all the issues re: assuming a new and foreign place will solve problems, of course all the issues re: treating these places as temporary solutions. I came home positively horny to do work and do laundry and be alone and see my friends.
My normal shopping habit is to pick up an armful of lemons every time I buy food and since I’ve gotten back I’ve been trying to swap them out for limes, mostly just to be less boring (I can be so boring) and because of the eggs, which I’m eating with far less resentment now. I’ll boil a whole mess of them and use them however I can, maybe as a garnish for a salad or a grain bowl or whatever the kids are eating these days, and I’ll dress the whole thing with a big squeeze of lime, and I recommend all of it, even the questionable life decisions and the quesadillas for dinner.
For the record, here is how I have come to boil my eggs: I put them in cold salted water, then bring them to a boil, then boil them for five minutes, which makes for soft but not totally molten yolks, and whites that are cooked through but not rubbery. I pour off the water and run cold water over the pot until the eggs are cool enough to peel, or sometimes instead of peeling them I’ll put them in a bowl in the fridge for later. I used to just plop my eggs into salted boiling water and cook them for seven minutes, which makes for almost-runny yolks that are good for, say, a bowl of rice, but then a chef was like “when you do that the heat is not reaching the inside of the egg and that’s why your egg is not cooking evenly” so now one of the most grownup things I do is actually watch my pot boil, and then set a timer once it does. It’s my two cents! Don’t forget to salt your water and wear sunscreen.
*can we stop calling them farm eggs, all eggs come from a farm, even the bad scary ones hatched by mutant tortured hens
n.b. // something to read: I wrote about my onetime obsession with healthy living blogs for the Hairpin, and I hope you’ll check it out; this is something I’ve wanted to write for a while about a very weird specific and formative time in my life! But it's also about blogs.