Cobb Salad

Sometimes I channel my inner TGI Fridays, and crave a Cobb salad. Luckily for me, so does my wife.  Truthfully, it’s a bit of a production, but if done in order, you and your special someone can be sitting down to this

in about 30 minutes.    Left to right, hard boiled eggs, bacon, blue cheese, avocado, tomato, chicken and chopped romaine on the bottom.  Here are some tips for a speedy assemblage of these guys.  First, have maybe some leftover chicken in the fridge, you know from the “Roast Chicken” (remember to say that with an English accent),  crisp your bacon on a plate between paper towels for 3 minutes, and WHATEVER you do ! Start the eggs first.

Full proof method of hard boiling eggs.  Notice how perfect they are in the photo.  Place eggs in saucepan and cover with cold water, turn on high. Look at the clock. Tell yourself in ten minutes to turn heat off.  Then do it. Wait another ten minutes. Remove eggs.

Let’s recap. Ten minutes in water while the heat is on, ten minutes heat off.   Perfection every time.  So during that twenty minutes, assemble the other ingredients. 

Or, you can do what I did a couple months ago.

Assemble all the ingredients, THEN realize I forgot the eggs!!!! (Insert drama music here)

So now I’m facing a delay of another 25 minutes until lunch is ready, while my better half’s blood sugar is hovering just north of her toenails.  Just then, I look to my shoulder to find what appears to be a startling miniature image of myself in chef whites, except this version of me has a tail, a couple horns on his head, and he’s holding a pitchfork.  Weird. 

“Dude,” this mini Tim says to me, “use the microwave.” He says this while pointing with his pitchfork.

My first thought was, where did he get that mini chef coat?  My second thought was I had never cooked an egg in the microwave. “I can’t do that.”

“Dude, sure you can! It cooks everything faster”

“Who are you talking to, honey?”  asks my beautiful bride from upstairs, “Is lunch ready yet? I’m starving. “

I look back to my little friend as he’s mouthing the words “honey I’m starving” while nodding his head towards the microwave.  I grab two eggs, place them in a shallow pool of water in a pyrex pan, cover, place into the microwave, set it for 3 minutes, then on high.

I’m fourteen years old.  I’m in the woods with my brother in law, holding his double barrel Winchester shotgun.  I never shot one before.  We all have plenty of firsts in life, and I’m pretty sure most of us remember the first time we pulled a trigger of a shotgun. This gun had two triggers, two barrels.

“Now, just point at the tree there, and slowly pull the trigger.

BOOM!!!

How does one describe a deafening explosion without all caps and upgrade of font size? That boom was a product of me pulling both triggers and that boom knocked me on my ass and I hadn’t heard such a boom again until sometime just less than three minutes after I pressed the start button on the microwave.

The microwave jumped about four inches to the right. It nearly came off the shelf.  It had steam leaking from the lower right corner, and I knew, I had done something terribly wrong.  I opened the door to find the lid off the Pyrex,  one egg intact, and the ceiling of the microwave covered in faint yellow debris.  If you could spray eggs, like from an aerosol can, that's what it looked like.

Needless to say, that Cobb salad was egg-less.  So remember sports fans, always start your eggs first, and if a miniature self appears on your shoulders, don't listen to it.

Enjoy!