Apron Free Cooking ~ Easy Cheesy Deviled Eggs

By Noel Lizotte

Easter is almost here. Since my daugh­ter went to col­lege, this year we’re not mak­ing any hard­boiled col­ored Easter eggs at my house. That’s always been a fam­ily tra­di­tion, each child col­ored a dozen eggs. Then on Easter morn­ing the great Easter Egg Hunt was on! I’m not going to miss hid­ing sev­eral dozen eggs in my liv­ing room this year.

I am the old­est of five chil­dren. Some­where along the line, mom’s rule of one dozen boiled, col­ored and hid­den eggs per child became a whole heck of a lot of eggs. Think about the sim­ple math… 5 times 12 equals 60. That’s a lot of eggs to hide and find. That’s a lot of eggs to eat.

We devel­oped a cou­ple of recipes to use up the large quan­tity of eggs. You know, hard boiled eggs don’t keep for­ever. We had to eat all 60 of those eggs in fairly short order. We had the oblig­a­tory dev­iled eggs for Easter din­ner. We had egg salad sand­wiches in our lunches. We had chopped eggs on our sal­ads at sup­per. We had hard boiled eggs for a snack.

As an adult, I’ve met peo­ple who rel­ish dev­iled eggs. They had a spe­cial recipe they make to bring to fam­ily potlucks. They have secret ingre­di­ents. The even have a spe­cial dev­iled egg plat­ter to place all the eggs on so they look extra pretty.

I’ve never had one of those pretty plat­ters. My eggs just all sit on a reg­u­lar din­ner plate. This had turned out to be a bit haz­ardous at times, when the trip from refrig­er­a­tor to din­ing room table took a sharp turn at the kitchen door. Hard boiled eggs are slip­pery lit­tle bug­gers. They also are not sal­vage­able once they’ve landed on the floor. Good thing my dogs like eggs.

When my dev­iled eggs make it to the din­ner table, peo­ple eat them up. I think it’s part of the Easter tra­di­tion, whether they like dev­iled eggs or not. My dad seems to enjoy the eggs. My nieces hadn’t been very enthu­si­as­tic about dev­iled eggs until I served the Easy Cheesy Dev­iled Egg recipe below. Now, my sis­ter says they are fans of the dev­iled egg treat.

Easy Cheesy Dev­iled Eggs

12 large Eggs hard boiled

1/2 cup Ched­dar Cheese shredded

1/2 cup Ricotta Cheese

3 tea­spoons Yel­low Mustard

1/2 cup Mayonnaise

Peel hard­boiled eggs. Slice eggs in half. Place yolks in a bowl and whites on a plate. Using a fork, smash egg yolks into crumbly bits. Add may­on­naise, cheeses and mus­tard to yolks and mix well. Scoop spoon­fuls of yolk mix­ture into cups of egg whites. Sprin­kle with pep­per or paprika to taste.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Val­ues: Serv­ings 12. Amount Per Serv­ing: Calo­ries: 150, Total Fat: 11g, Cho­les­terol: 223mg, Sodium: 188mg, Total Carbs: 4g, Dietary Fiber: 0g, Pro­tein: 9g.

Make it a meal: Serve beside your Easter ham and some green veg­eta­bles. This is a great side dish to bring to the next fam­ily potluck. Or, if you’ve got some left in the fridge, fold inside a piece of bread, instant egg salad sandwich!

If you want to make your eggs extra pretty, and you have one of those icing bags with the snazzy tips that bak­ers use, you can pipe the yolks into the eggs white cups. These always look so nice when I see them at potlucks. I don’t have any fancy bak­ing equip­ment like that, so the best I can do is a tea­spoon dol­lop in my eggs.

I read some­where that a plas­tic zip top bag with the cor­ner snipped off works almost as nicely as the icing bag. I may give that trick a try this Easter. If you try it, please let me know how it works out.

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinary.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Apr 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.