Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel, I Made You Out of Egg...

I got a voicemail from a friend the other day asking me if I knew how to tell a hard boiled egg from a raw egg without cracking the shell. He knew, and of course I knew (because I know everything and am the smartest woman alive), but he was with someone who didn't know. I was caught a little off guard by this. I posted a poll on my What the Bleep fan page on Facebook (Have you checked it out yet?) to find out who else knew... and everyone knew. I assumed it was this thing we all learned in 1st grade science, or maybe on 3-2-1 Contact! for those of you Gen X-ers, but apparently I was wrong. Some are still in the dark. Let me turn the light on for you.

When an egg is raw, the yolk and white are still in their liquid form. Obviously. You can shake the egg, roll it around the counter top, whatever... and the yolk and white will be able to move around inside of the shell. When you boil the egg, the white expands briefly before it finishes cooking and the cooked yolk stays put inside of the white. In their solid forms, they are stuck in place and can't move around.
If you stand a hard boiled egg up on its butt- the bigger end- and spin it like a top, it will spin for like ever. If you do the same to a raw egg, it will just wobble and fall over because the liquid insides are moving around and making the egg lose its balance. This is the trick. Just spin the egg like a top (or a dreidel, if you're Lexi) and see if it keeps spinning or if it falls. Simple as that. And if you didn't know this, I'd send an email to your school board and ask them why they never taught you the stuff you really needed to know in elementary science. Jerks.

And Oldie But Goodie for St. Patrick's Day

In honor of the holiday where its socially acceptable to drink before noon, here's a blog from a couple of years ago to help get you in the Irish spirit... And yes, that's me in the hat and beard. I was most definitely in the spirit of St. Patty's when it was taken.

Dear Tricia, I am very proud of my irish heritage, but what kind of self-respecting Irishman doesn't know how to make corned beef? What makes corned beef corned? With St. Patrick's day only a few months away I'm
starting to freak out a little bit because my rigorous drinking schedule precludes me from much cooking. I can't just serve potatoes again this year! Help me out here.

Well, my Irish friend, I've found some helpful info for you. Let's get down to business. First of all, corned beef is usually a brisket (but sometimes a round roast... all hail the mighty rump roast!) that is pickled (or "cured") in a brine. A brine is a very salted, seasoned liquid. That's what they also do to bacon. So, the brisket gets soaked in the brine and then cooked. The Oxford dictionary defines "corn" as a small hard particle, a grain, as of sand or salt. So "corned" refers to the grains of salt used to cure it. Those pesky Brits; so pompous with their fancy pants vocabulary. You can also take the corned beef one step further and smoke it. That's what pastrami is. You almost always will buy corned beef already cooked so all you have to do is slice it and serve.
Wanna know the history of it? Too bad you don't have a choice: continue reading. When Irish immigrants came to New York, the lower east siders decided that they wanted a cured meat that was similar in taste and texture to their beloved Irish bacon. So they learned a cheaper alternative from their friendly Jewish neighbors and started using corned beef instead. (insert politically incorrect Jewish joke here.)
St. Patty's Day always happens during Lent, and if you were raised Catholic (like I was, which is why I'm the furthest thing from Catholic as an adult) you know that you're not allowed to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. However, if St. Patrick's Day falls on a Friday during Lent, some bishops will pardon your heathen ways. It's rare: the next St. Patrick's Day on a Friday during Lent won't happen for another 9 years. In the mean time, enjoy your corned beef and Irish Car Bombs and green shirts and pinching. If you can slice up a corned brisket and serve it as a sandwich, I think your party guests will be content. All they're looking for is a sponge for all their alcohol anyways, right?

Imposter Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Dear Tricia, My dad makes AWESOME chocolate chip cookies. When I asked for the recipe he told me he used the recipe off the back of the Toll House bag. So I tried to make cookies at home and they didn’t taste right. The only thing I could come up with, is the he used “real” vanilla extract, and the only thing I had was “imitation” vanilla that I use to keep my cake icings white. Could the “imitation” be the flavor culprit?

Hmmm... they tasted different when you only changed one thing, so my first instinct is to say, yes, that's the culprit. That's just logical. But I can't write a one sentence blog, so lets take a quick class on vanilla, shall we?
Real vanilla extract comes from vanilla beans, which are grown in hot, humid areas ranging from Mexico all the way down to the West Indies and South America. Vanilla has been around since the 15th Century (well, I'm sure its been around longer, but that's when "we" discovered it) and is the second most expensive spice in the world, right behind saffron. Vanilla is so expensive because it takes so damn long for actual plants to grow. A vanilla plant will need 3 years just to be strong enough to grow the vanilla blossoms that will turn into vanilla pods. But remember 4th grade science and all that talk about pollination? Well the only insect that can successfully pollinate a vanilla blossom is one single type of bee that only lives in Mexico. And as I've already mentioned, vanilla grows in lots of places outside of Mexico. So guess who has to pollinate it? The growers. Vanilla has to be pollinated by hand within 12 hours of the blossoms opening. That's it. A 12 hour window or nothing else. After each blossom is painstakingly pollinated by human hands, it needs another 10 months just to grow the vanilla pods, which are what we use for baking. That's a pretty high maintenance plant. Super needy. (Ladies, when it comes to relationships, don't try to be too much like a vanilla plant. Positive results probably aren't in your favor.) But then it keeps going... after the pods are harvested, they have to be aged, dried, cured, "sweated", conditioned... it goes through a months-long process of being wrapped in fabrics and left in boxes and dipped in boiling water and all kinds of booby traps that help it develop its characteristic flavors. No wonder its so freaking expensive.
So, back to Imitation Vanilla. You know how every celebrity has a designer perfume? Like Paris Hilton, for example, will go on and on about how her perfume has components of grapefruit, musk, and vanilla, and cheap hooker in it? The designer imposter version of her perfume probably only has a limited number of those components in it. Most likely the cheap hooker one, since that's the most recognizable. Well vanilla has 171 identifiable aromatic components. (Imagine having the job that defines all those... crazy.) And imitation vanilla only has 1 of those components in it, Vanillin. And unfortunately, vanillin is produced as a by product of the paper industry. Gross. This is why the complexity of the real deal is so much more noticeable than the fake one. And possibly why your cookies taste different than your dads.
If you decide that real vanilla is something you want to include in your baking, you don't always have to use vanilla extract. You can also find ground vanilla pods (vanilla powder), vanilla sugar, or you can use the whole pods, which can get expensive.
The other thing I thought of... butter. In baking, you're usually supposed to use unsalted butter because salt is already going to be included somewhere else in the recipe. Find out if he's using salted butter, or maybe you are and didn't realize it. That could also affect the flavor. Let me know how it works out for you.