How Not to Fry an Egg

I know it’s almost cliche to bitch about the heat at this point. But whatever. It’s hot. And when it’s hot and we’ve been inside for 8 hours, moaning from a wedding-induced hangover, we start to play MythBusters.

In case you don’t have a boyfriend who thinks that decoding the Seinfeld double dipping hypothesis and the slippery banana peel joke are utterly important viewing, than you should try out MythBusters on a lazy weekend afternoon. You might be mildly entertained.

Anyway. It was hot. The heat index screamed 113 degrees in Durham, North Carolina. We decided the only proper way to appreciate the heat was to attempt to fry an egg outside. So we tried.

Our experiment lacked integrity from the start. It was later in the day, we fried the egg on a piece of tin foil that had not been left in the heat long enough and the egg might not have even been at room temperature. It became shady. But we did throw some butter in that aluminum foil nest.

We briefly looked at some promising stories of outside-fried eggs and thought we could make it work.

It didn’t. But that doesn’t mean we won’t try again. Or that you don’t have plenty of horror stories of your own to share.

From the School of George Costanza

What would happen if we didn’t live by certain social norms?

Would we keep the napkin on the table instead of the lap?
Would we tip a dollar on a dollar beer?
Would we drink everything out of a straw?

I don’t know. Well, except for the last question. And that is an enthusiastic yes.

But I am pretty sure that if George Costanza didn’t stigmatize the double dip I think we would all be happily consuming twice as much dip than chip. Of course the garlicky hummus is more delicious than that celery stick. But we cannot indulge in our love of sour cream and onion. We must only dip once.

Except for Jack. Jack is almost 17 months (I think I got that weird months thing right) and while he can walk, color and bang spoons on a table, he has not picked up on the no double dip rule. I watched in fascination as he triumphantly dipped his tortilla chip into a bowl of creamy spinach dip, over and over and over. He never took a bite of the chip. It was awesome.