Preoccupied with Poaching

Blogging again so soon after my last post is probably not a good sign. Other than my undying love for food (and a few other rare exceptions), I tend to be crazy about a thing until I'm not anymore, at which point I drop it like a hot potato. I wish I had the ability to distribute my enthusiasm more evenly over time, but it's my understanding that a person's personality is fully formed around age 12. A good thirty or so years of cultivating an abbreviated attention span probably doesn't herald an epiphanic transformation any time soon...

Over the past few days I've been looking for an excuse to poach an egg for myself. I dearly love a poached egg, although those near to me want no part of it. My mother says it makes her upper lip sweat to think of eating raw eggs, and Mark comes dangerously close to retching when I puncture the albumin to gratify my need for liquid yolk. I live in the hope that their tastes will mature, but there's that pesky personality-formed-at-age-12 concept again.

The leftover asparagus from last night's dinner was a perfect vehicle for my latest obsession, so after my 7-mile bike ride this afternoon I promptly set in to do the deed. First I added a touch of salt and way more than a touch of vinegar to some boiling water. I cracked the egg into a long-handled ladle to give me more control and to minimize the chance of inserting parts of my hand into the water. I mention this because, while cooking, I frequently reach a nirvanic state in which I believe I can put my hands in boiling liquid and touch hot objects bare-handed without incurring any damage. It's an optimal state of mind, really, but it can quickly turn hellish at the moment you realize it's not working out all that well from a physical standpoint.

Anyway, slipped the egg into the boiling water, but the yolk defied me by detaching from the white and slipping to the bottom of the pan (amazingly, even though I broke the yolk accidentally when I cracked the egg, the white solidified quickly to seal the break, so no ugly result). After watching the yolk wallow around at the bottom of the pan for about 2 minutes, I decided it was time to reunite it with the rest of the egg, so I used a slotted spoon to fish it all out. I very nearly became frustrated with the look of it until I liberated it from the water and realized it really hadn't turned out all that badly. And the timing was nearly perfect - rather than clocking it, I used the scientific approach and gauged the degree of doneness by the jiggly factor, agitating the spoon at intervals to be sure the yolk wasn't overcooking. Sprinkled a bit of goat cheese onto the heated asparagus, topped it with the poached egg, and finished it with a bit of freshly ground Himalayan salt (I'll save my recent salt kick for a future blog...)and cracked pepper - it was truly divine.