Gordon Myers

The Ten-Egg Challenge: Part 6

Posted on Dec 6, 2012 at 11:44pm by Gordon Myers

Day 6: Over Medium Over Hard

Tonight's egg post comes to you much later than usual, because I didn't get home until 9:30 PM! I left straight from work to drive over to the Young Shakespeare Player's Theater on West Lawn Avenue in downtown Madison. They are a remarkable little organization - more on that later. The short and short of it is one of my Sunday School students was performing in their rendition of "Twelfth Night" this evening. So I finally got home just now, and the first thing I wanted was dinner. And the first component of that dinner was this over hard egg.

Here's what you'll need to cook an over hard egg:

• A frying pan,
• A spatula,
• Some butter, and
• An egg

Notice that this is the same list of requirements as for Over Easy eggs, since the only ingredient that varies between the two styles is time. The instructions start out just the same: grease the pan with copious amounts of butter, making sure it spreads over the whole surface of the pan, and heat your burner to a medium heat. Then crack the egg in and wait, just as you would with over easy. I said last night that I had come up with an idea to help improve my egg-flipping abilities. I stole a canister of pink Play-Doh from the Sunday School at church last night ("stole" isn't the right word considering I was the one who bought it originally), and molded some of that into the shape of a fried egg. I took an extra pan and dropped my pink fake fried egg in there to practice flipping. I've actually put together a quick video of my attempts, which also includes the final actual egg flip at the end, too.

So continuing on... after the egg has been in there for about two or three minutes (the egg whites should of course be totally opaque), you give it a flip. As you'll see in the video, my egg flipping skills have improved dramatically! My theory is that if you're bad at something, just keep doing it repeatedly until you become good at it. You will. Plus, a little Rocky Balboa music doesn't hurt either.  But back to the egg, you want to wait another two minutes or so, and then take it out of the pan and onto your serving plate. You'll know you've done it right if the yolk is solid, as pictured below. Now I do have a confession to make, which some of you have probably already picked up on from the strike-through lettering above. I had originally intended to cook an over medium egg tonight, but it wound up being over hard instead. But, you know, I was already planning on doing over hard as part of this challenge anyway, so it got moved up to tonight! The reason was I was so distracted thinking about the perfect flip that I left it on the burner longer than I had originally intended.

The results? If an over easy egg and a hard boiled egg had a baby, it would be a really bizarre chicken. And if that went on to lay an egg, it would be this over hard egg. I like the "over easy" part of this egg - the good, fried whites - but I'm not a big fan of the hard yolk. Again, it wasn't bad, per se; it's just not my thing. I'll give it a 4 out of 10. But as for the Shakespeare play I attended, it was INCREDIBLE! That gets a solid 11. I'll be going to that same theater again next week when another church member is taking part in a dramatic reading of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I had the privilege of seeing that story read, unabridged, in a dramatic style last year, and that was a real treat.

The thing about YSP is that they do everything unabridged. In the case of Dickens' Christmas Carol, that is wonderful. In the case of Shakespeare, well, expect three to four hours minimum per play. But I have to say, I really enjoyed Twelfth Night a lot! I admit I didn't totally know what was going on all the time, but I definitely picked up on the major plot points and all the innuendos. Shakespeare was no shrinking violet when it comes to innuendos. Check back tomorrow to see which kind I'm cooking up next.