Garam Masala Deviled Eggs

I have to say these Garam Masala Deviled Eggs are surprisingly good. I’ve said it before: Deviled eggs used to make me wretch. The slightest whiff of a hard-cooked egg yolk would trigger my gag reflex initiating a fierce struggle to throw off the resulting wave of panic and nausea. Mom never bought my kitchen theatrics much, but to me they were both bodily convulsions and ‘fight or flight’ responses over which I had no control.

“How come you like scrambled eggs?“, she would say.

True, I had no such issues with the common scrambled egg but I would go batshit nutso if my over-easy was just a minute too ‘over’ leaving …gasp… evidence of a hard cooked center.

It was just one more of one of those things on the long list of things that I understood about myself that nobody else did.

An egg salad sandwich in my lunch bag would get tossed in the trash more out of sheer medical necessity than out of sheer personal preference. My disdain for the hard-cooked egg was so well known I could never understand Mom’s periodic insistence on letting it make an appearance in my school lunch bag every couple of months. Either she was purposely abusing me or hoping hunger itself would do what she could not and coax me into appreciating hard cooked eggs.

“Help! Child abuse! I’m being poisoned by my mother!”

Egg salad was one thing but to my way of thinking a deviled egg was the perfect distillation of the enemy — a compact grenade of terror. Incoming! One year my mother decided that we each had to eat the eggs we decorated for Easter. I responded by opting out of the tradition altogether and became a Jew.

Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) as I got older my various tastes broadened. I grew more able to control my gag reflex and became more confident in confronting and overcoming certain. Some things were meant to be more enjoyed than I realized. I also realized that the Deviled Egg I had feared for so long had a lot more to offer me. As a group, they were more diverse than I had initially known. Something for everybody!

Interesting and tasty flavors can be had without a lot of effort. Several recipes have strong flavors used to masque the pungent aromas I had objected to. The unthinkable can be made quite nice. Anchovy paste makes for a for a delicious Caesar-Deviled Egg and lots of shallots and Dijon added flair to the Deviled Egg with Capers and Tarragon not a single reader commented on! .

Give it a try. You might like it. You certainly shouldn’t fear it. Certainly not these Garam Masala Deviled Eggs.

Garam Masala Deviled Eggs