Good morning. Dorie Greenspan has a lovely column in The New York Times Magazine this week devoted to the pleasures of oeuf mayonnaise (above), a classic appetizer of peeled boiled eggs under satiny mayonnaise that is so revered in France that there is a society there to protect its sanctity: the Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise. “Les temps passé, les oeufs durent,” reads the tagline on their website. “Time passes, the eggs last.”
It’s a simple dish to make — seven-minute eggs draped in a mayonnaise sparkling with lemon juice and white wine vinegar and seasoned with salt and mustard — but you must attend carefully to the mayonnaise in order to have it loose enough to ribbon over the eggs. A few drizzles of hot water or more lemon juice will do it. Serve it plain or with fillets of anchovy or strips of red pepper, snipped chives, fried capers, as you like.
I like chicken in mustard sauce to follow, with rice and a crisp green salad.
You might prefer chile-oil noodles with cilantro tonight, though, or a simple pasta with brown butter and Parmesan. Monday nights can be great for a kale and quinoa salad with tofu and miso, but if that’s too much prep work, there’s always kimchi grilled cheese or a fried egg quesadilla.
How about cauliflower ceviche with avocado, seaweed and soy sauce? Or this crème fraîche pasta with peas and scallions?
Definitely you’ll want to consider this abdoogh khiar, a delightful chilled Persian soup that combines buttermilk and yogurt with a riot of crunch from cucumbers, walnuts and lavash, some sweet raisins and an herbal punch of dill, chives and mint.
And casting our eyes toward the future, you might cook extra eggs when you make the ouefs mayo, so that you can put together an egg-salad sandwich for lunch tomorrow: either this yolk-heavy version from Eli Zabar or this Los Angeles classic from Konbi in Echo Park. (Or go off book and make your own: mayonnaise, more Dijon than you’d usually use, a lot of tarragon, salt and pepper.)
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