I am obsessed with the Olympics, and I have been since I first picked up Nagano Winter Olympics ’98 on my Nintendo 64. It does not matter if it is the Summer or Winter Games, and it does not matter the competition as I will watch everything from Modern Pentathlon and Mogul Skiing to Swimming and Figure Skating. My love for seeing the best in all of these sports compete for those medals is why I woke up at 3:30 AM to catch qualifiers in multiple sports live, and why I will be waking up at the same time tomorrow to see the opening ceremonies live on Peacock.
I will say that, watching Curling live -especially after I participated in my first beginner’s tournament as a curler- makes me appreciate just how effortless these athletes make the game look. Curling is a lot of fun, but it DEFINITELY is not easy to play…especially when you’re trying to get the rock (those curling stones that they slide across the ice) to stop at a particular spot in the target area on the other side.
While I will not be going to the Olympics anytime soon for Curling, I am going to continue to play. I have signed up for my second beginner’s tournament that will start this weekend! I can only get better at this winter sport that I’ve picked up and kind of falling in Love, Eorzea Style with.
Of course, I will keep prioritizing Cooking Eorzea too, as this weekly column has become quite important to me.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
Recipe of the Week
This week’s Cooking Eorzea dish, the 13th recipe with an ‘Easy’ Difficulty rating…is Deviled Eggs. Or, as I have heard this style of dish called before while growing up in the South: ‘Angel Eggs’. This dish comes from the Coerthas Region of Eorzea and it is the first dish that I made to have an optional topping of sardines listed.
Here is what the dish is supposed to look like once it is finished:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s featured ingredient is sardines and they come from the herring family. I have never bought a tin of sardines before in my life, and I opted for sardines to be packed in water instead of some sort of oil because that just seemed to be less gross to have to work with. I will say that I had a heck of a time getting them out of the tin…so the turn of phrase “packed like sardines” really is NOT a joke or inappropriate to the saying’s meaning.
My Cooking Attempt
As always, I will start off by showing off the full set of ingredients used:
The first thing I did was to take some of the parsley out of the bunch and mince it up. I then set some of it aside for this dish, and the remainder went back into the fridge.
I placed eight eggs (a close friend of mine suggested that I put in a couple extra in case if they don’t come out right the first time) in a pot of water and then I set it on top of the stove to boil.
Once they were done, I pulled them off the stove, dropped the pot under cool water, and then scooped the eggs out and dunked them into an ice bath. The ‘shock’ is supposed to stop the eggs cooking and solidify them within the shell.
I then dunked my hand into the freezing cold ice water to pull out an egg after a few minutes…
…And I found out that my eggs didn’t cook all the way through. I ended up cracking a mostly raw egg.
The remaining eggs went back on the stove, back into the ice bath, and then I went to crack one open again…
I then cracked the egg…Only to find that it was STILL not cooked through.
I put all the eggs back into the pot, boiled them again, and then dunked them in the ice bath. Once I pulled them out, I cracked that same egg from before…only to find out that it was still raw.
This failure to hard boil eggs was extremely frustrating to deal with, to be completely honest- and it was the biggest issue I have had for Cooking Eorzea so far. I have spent far too long trying and failing to hard boil an egg at this point, and I was about ready to give up for the night. That said- I decided to give it one more try. I let the eggs boil for longer than before, and I let the eggs sit in the bath for the better part of an hour.
SUCCESS! The eggs were cooked through this time! I was so happy because I was probably going to cry if I failed a fourth time at making boiled eggs. Yes, it was that bad and frustrating to fail at over and over again.
I swiftly peeled all six eggs, with some timely knocking on the cutting block to crack the shell.
I then cut each egg in half…and the yolks were still yellow and cooked through! I won’t lie, I was so, SO excited about this.
I then pulled all of the yolks out of the eggs and put them into a medium-sized bowl. Admittedly, some came out easier than others.
When I was done, I surprisingly didn’t destroy any of the egg halves while removing the yolks.
I then added in mayonnaise, mustard, fish sauce, and lemon juice into the bowl with all of the egg yolks.
I then added in the minced parsley from earlier and some salt and pepper.
I got out my trusty whisk, and I blended it all together. It went surprisingly quickly, and I was able to have the final wet filling completed in almost no time.
I ladled the wet filling into each egg half, and I managed to not dump it all over the eggs and onto my cutting board.
I then added paprika to the top of each egg…only as you can see here, I managed to absolutely dump it EVERYWHERE on a couple of eggs while only barely dusting other eggs. The paprika was an absolute mess to try to sprinkle on top with.
I then cracked open my ingredient of the week, the sardines. The sardines were surprisingly hard to remove from the tin, and I ended up having to wedge them out with a fork in order to use them.
I handbroke the sardines up and laid individual chunks on some of the eggs after I moved the deviled eggs to their final plate.
And here is the final dish!
I then sampled both styles of eggs- those with sardines and those without. And I have to say that they weren’t bad. The sardines blended in surprisingly well with the deviled eggs, and the deviled eggs by themselves were pretty good. I will be completely honest: I was expecting to HATE the deviled eggs topped with sardines. But I was happy that I went in with an open mind and tried them out for this week’s Cooking Eorzea.
Afterword
This is a dish that I would make for a party and serve to people, as it was relatively easy to make once I got the hard-boiling eggs part down. Everyone I mentioned this dish to questioned the use of sardines as a topping, however, and so I would probably only top a fourth of them with sardines unless people started to request it. It is just a weird topping that does somehow work with the dish.
This is where I start with the ‘thank yous’ every week. I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game.
Next Week
Next week’s Cooking Eorzea dish is Forest Miq’abob. This dish requires me to use a grill for the first time…which I am more than a little nervous about. Please check it out!
What do you think of sardines as a topping for deviled eggs? Are you watching the Winter Olympics?
Let us know in the comments below!
