Egg Salad Should Not Be Feared

Egg salad just sounds weird. I'll admit - I hadn't tried it until about 6 years ago (yikes! okay so maybe it was a while ago, but now I feel old so lets pretend that's not so long) when miss Emily Ann, one of the most wonderful people on this planet, picked me up to go to a DMB concert in Saratoga.  We were rising seniors in High School.  This was going to be a great road trip.  And Em brought the snacks - they were typical high school fare: Cheetos, Tostitos, and...egg salad???!!!

It freaked me out.  Em was sitting there, happily dipping her chips in the egg salad, when I said "hm, if Em can do it, so can I."  And it was love ever since.

As someone who's keeping to a semi-vegetarian, mostly pescatarian (and sometimes just plain omnivorous, but that's only sometimes) diet, I love that egg salad is a viable sandwich option without being only veggies. It doesn't need to be creepy and smooth, either.  Celery adds a delicious crunch and keeping the mayo to a minimum lets the egg flavor shine - whatever that means.

Anyway, here's the recipe you'll need to make the perfect egg salad sandwich:

Egg Salad
Makes 2 sandwiches
(printable recipe here)

5 hard-boiled eggs (cold or room temp)
1 tablespoon mayo
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
1/2-1 rib of celery, diced
salt and pepper to taste
optional (but recommended in any combination):
dash of curry powder
dash of paprika
dash of cayenne

Place the whole eggs in a mixing bowl.  I prefer to use 3 whole eggs and 2 whites  because the texture of hard-boiled yolks doesn't necessarily tickle my fancy, but that's entirely up to you.  Don't worry - when I'm at home I feed the yolks to the Boofer and the Doofer (my dogs, Breeze and Knight respectively), because yolks make their coat nice and shiny.  Here I feed them to the compactor, which is slightly less economical but it's two yolks, okay?  Give me a break.

Add in the rest of the ingredients and get to chopping and mixing with a fork.  Keeping the eggs whole at first allows you to keep chunks in the egg salad so it's not so smooth.  Refrigerate the salad until cold and then serve it on a slice of Sar's amazing sandwich bread (toasted if you're not bringing it to work!).  Adding a leaf of lettuce would complete the sandwich, but I ate all of our lettuce last night soo...my sandwich was 100% pure egg salad.  And, I'll say it.  It was "egg-cellent".

Disclaimer:  The egg salad sandwich photo is NOT of my sandwich...in case you were confused.  It's of a sandwich that Sar made weeks ago on another loaf of bread and with cucumbers.  But I'll have you know the egg salad was just as delicious that time as it was this time...and I gobbled it up so quickly this time there wasn't a moment free to take a picture.  I figured a Blackberry photo from work during lunch wouldn't cut it.

-Lil