Miss Daisy's Deviled Eggs

"Yes, Miss Daisy!" That's what my relatives said when I made this recipe three or four times while they were holiday houseguests. Seriously, each time I would make this recipe, my relatives would wolf down the finished product within minutes like Peter Griffin ate soup in the Family Guy episode where he found out he was retarded. Just inhaled the eggs. I'm not even sure they chewed.

This recipe really isn't anything complicated or difficult. It's just very, very good. Simple, standard, even a bit pedestrian. The "unique" additions are pretty basic, too - just Worcestershire sauce and some green onions. But as was noted months ago when this blog began, anytime a deviled egg recipe seems like it's missing something, it's missing pickle relish. And sure enough, Miss Daisy includes pickle relish in this recipe.

Here is the recipe:

6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chilled
1/4 cup mayonnaise
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
1 green onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon well-drained pickle relish
paprika for garnish

1. Mash egg yolks until smooth.
2. Combine yolks, mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, salt, and pepper and mix until smooth.
3. Stir in onion and pickle relish.
4. Spoon mixture into egg whites.
5. Sprinkle with paprika.


Above: adding the mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, and mustard

Above: adding the salt and pepper


Above: adding the onions and relish; and the finished product

A couple of interesting notes about this recipe. First, Miss Daisy specifies that the hard-boiled eggs be chilled prior to cutting them. So I did this, and the egg whites seemed to be a little more firm than usual. I didn't prefer them this way, but they were not bad or anything - just a different texture that I wouldn't necessarily duplicate. Second, Miss Daisy specifies that the pickle relish be "well-drained." I tried both ways, and amazingly, draining the relish DOES make a difference. The filling is just a little too runny with undrained relish, whereas it's perfect with well-drained relish.

Here are the scores:

Overall: 79 out of 100
Texture: 19 out 20
Flavor: 18 out of 20
Uniqueness: 12 out of 20
Appearance: 13 out of 20
Ease of preparation: 19 out of 20

Comments?

Chicken Deviled Eggs

Nearly all of the deviled egg recipes I have tried so far seem to follow a simple pattern. Mash up the yolks, add in some combination of mustard, mayonnaise, maybe a liquid like vinegar or relish, garnish with parsley or paprika. Maybe bacon here, maybe cheese there, maybe even some cream cheese. But these chicken deviled eggs seem to move beyond that simple deviled egg paradigm. Totally unique and delicious. Here's the recipe:

6 hard-boiled eggs

1/2 cup finely chopped cooked chicken

3 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 tablespoon grated sweet onion

1 tablespoon capers, drained and finely chopped

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon minced parsley

paprika, for garnish

Cook one chicken breast at 350 F for 20 minutes, then chop into very small pieces. Next grate sweet onion, drain and chop capers, and mice parsley. Add chicken, mayonnaise, sweet onion, capers, mustard, and parsley to the mashed yolks. Fill egg white halves with filling and garnish with paprika.

Above: adding the chicken, mayonnaise, and sweet onion to the mashed egg yolks. (Note: at the suggestion of a reader, I have mashed the yolks more finely.)

Above: adding the capers, mustard, and parsley.

Above: the finished product, garnished with paprika.

So there were a lot of interesting things going on in this recipe. First, the filling is basically a chicken salad - and this chicken salad is very good. It has a lot of ingredients, yet none of the ingredients dominate and each contributes something. Most deviled egg recipes I have tried that use parsley use it as a garnish, and here it goes into the filling and paprika is used as the garnish. Yet I think the parsley is needed - maybe it adds just a dash of green, maybe it's just for texture - who knows?

But I really liked these, in spite of the large amount of ingredients and the fact that so many ingredients have to be chopped. The texture, also, is perfect - thick enough to stand up in the egg halves, but not so thick that it can't be easily moved from the bowl to the eggs.

Overall: 77 out of 100 out of 100

Texture: 19 out of 20 (nearly perfect)

Flavor: 18 out of 20

Uniqueness: 17 out of 20

Appearance: 15 out of 20

Ease of preparation: 8 out of 20

Comments?

Green Onion-Dijon Deviled Eggs

Finally! After two disappointing deviled egg recipes, I finally returned to one that people actually want to eat. The sour cream lemon disasters are long-forgotten, and the boring cream cheese deviled eggs are banished to the back of my mind, where I might think of some actually flavorful deviled egg recipe that includes the uniqueness of cream cheese as its base.

But these are very good. The original recipe I used called these "Dijon Deviled Eggs" but the dominant flavor, without a doubt, is the green onion. In fact, the Dijon mustard's lack of presence if the only real drawback to this recipe.

Here is the recipe:

6 hard-boiled eggs
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 green onion, very thinly sliced (slice a little of the green and keep separate from the white)
few leaves of fresh flat-leaf parsley
freshly ground black pepper
salt, to taste
paprika, optional

1. Crumble egg yolks in bowl.
2. Add mayonnaise and Dijon mustard and combine.
3. Stir in white part of the onions and most of the chopped parsley.
4. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.
5. Fill egg whites with mixture and sprinkle with green part of onions and remaining parsely.
6. Sprinkle with a little pepper and/or paprika, if desired.

Above: adding the mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, and chopped onions. Also: the final product, after garnished with green part of onion, chopped parsley, and a little pepper and paprika.

Review: these are actually very good, and a little different. Rather than traditional deviled eggs, where the dominant flavor is the mayonnaise or mustard, the dominant flavor here is the onions. The paprika really serves as more of a garnish, and the parsley looks nice but doesn't add much. But these are a little better than the traditional eggs, and pretty easy to make. I think, if making them again, I would add more Dijon mustard so that flavor becomes more notable - it's supposed to be there, I just didn't really taste it much.

Overall: 71 out of 100

Texture: 15 out of 20

Flavor: 12 out of 20

Uniqueness: 13 out of 20

Appearance: 14 out of 20

Ease of preparation: 12 out of 20

Comments?