1/10/11

Ruta-Toot-Toot Egg Salad


It seems like I am more likely to post a recipe, if I happen to come up with some incredibly stupid name for it. They just come to me, I can't stop myself. It's like an incredibly ridiculous and useless gift. My mom always use to tell me that I was "full of it!" Although she still has yet to indicated the proper pronoun that she had in mind, I gathered based on her tone and the intensity of her eye roll (and yes, I mean eye, the singular form of the word, that is her gift) that it was not the noble kind of "it."

A few weeks ago at work we had a bean tasting and pot luck. We needed to update some of the descriptions for the eating beans we sell, so to help stratify the work and for an excuse to have a party, we each took home a different bag of beans to cook up. We were instructed to cook them up plain and set aside about 1 cup for the taste test and then get creative with the rest.

The night before the potluck I had no idea what to do with my "Good Mother Stallard" beans. While I was cooking the beans, I was also making up some egg salad for my lunch when I had a crazy idea to just add the beans to the egg salad. It seemed just crazy enough to work so I boldly went with the impulse. I thought it was a pretty yummy dish, but felt it was a bit risky and likely that no one else would feel the same. I prepared myself for the high likelihood that I would be taking home a lot of leftovers. Too my surprise, people actually ate and liked it. Over all the potluck was a complete success. It was one of the most creative potlucks I've ever been to and I stuffed myself so much trying everything that I didn't even eat dinner that night.

Recipe:
I started out with 6 hard boiled eggs, couple of spoonfuls of Mrs. Clark's mayonnaise, little bit of pickle juice, fresh or pickled dill, half an purple onion (chopped), 1-2 cups of cooked Good Mother Stallard beans, and to put the "ruta" in ruta-toot-toot I chopped up and added some pickled rutabaga spears I had made back in November. I know not everyone is going to have Rutabagas laying around, let alone know what they are, but I got them for free and have only really come to enjoy them when pickled and added in things.