Better luck next time

One night last week, (having acquired some extra eggs during a visit to Bex on the weekend) I turned to the eggs section of my Edmonds book. There were not many recipes left to choose from, so curried eggs (p95) was an easy selection.


It's really just hard-boiled eggs in a curry sauce, so I began by putting on some eggs to boil, while I made a start on chopping and cooking onions for the sauce. When the eggs were cooked, (in fact, a bit overcooked, as I discovered later) I set them aside to cool a bit so I could shell them without burning my hands.


The curry sauce is a basic white sauce with onions and curry added - you cook the onions first, then stir through curry powder, before the addition of flour and then milk, to make a sauce.


I accidentally allowed my sauce to thicken up a bit much - I was concentrating on getting the eggs shelled, halved and laid out in a dish. By the time the eggs were ready, the sauce was very thick and sort of went lumpy when I stirred it.


I attempted to pour my lumpy sauce over the eggs, but it was so thick I ended up kind of spooning it onto each of the eggs.


The result was extremely unappetising. I tried to think of something I could do to make my curried eggs a bit more appealing, and decided that serving them on a salad would improve both the appeal and the nutritional content of the meal.


It only took one taste for me to realise I'd forgotten to season the sauce. Considering it had a whole teaspoon of curry powder in it, the sauce was remarkably bland. I sprinkled extra salt and pepper on top of the eggs instead, achieving a considerable improvement in the flavour.

That's not to say it was a particularly enjoyable meal. If you took a mouthful that was mostly egg and salad, with only a bit of sauce, it was pleasant enough. I have to say that any enjoyment I got out of that meal was in spite of the sauce, not because of it.


It may be a bit unfair for me to criticise a recipe that was in many ways unsuccessful due to my own slip-ups. But even if I had made the sauce to a decent consistency, and had remembered to put seasoning in the sauce instead of on top of it, I still don't think I'd have liked it. Well, at least this recipe is going to have another chance to prove itself. The variation 'salmon curried eggs' is still on my 'to do' list. Let's hope I'm more successful with that one!