Eggs

Thank God for Joan and Don. Without their lunchtime escape from the office, replete with witty, sexy banter, this episode, the worst of the season, would have been pointless. Nothing else quite worked here, in what clearly was a transitional throwaway leading up to the final few episodes this season. I, for one, do not care about Lane's financial issues (though, surely him forging Don's signature on a check to pay debts will come back to bite him). Anything involving Harry is sort of blah, even though his subplot this week brought back and old friend, Paul Kinsey, who has, ahem, gone through some changes.

Food Network star Giada De Laurentiis says that her mother would make frittatas, the Italian egg dish, with whatever leftovers she had in the refrigerator. " That was the joke," she tells viewers in segment of her cooking show. "What's in the frittata today, Mama?" What better dish to serve Mom on Mother's Day? A frittata is quick and easy, and the kids can help. As a bonus, Mom wakes to a clean fridge. An omelet without the fold and a quiche without the crust, the frittata has its own selling points: It can be sliced and eaten, hot or cold, with a fork or fingers.

Each week a nutritionist from the University of Maryland Medical Center provides a guest post to The Baltimore Sun's health blog Picture of Health (baltimoresun.com/pictureofhealth), which is reprinted here. This week, Elaine Pelc weighs in on eggs. Are eggs really incredible? Yes! Eggs are affordable, a great source of lean protein, full of vitamins and minerals and low in calories, weighing in at about 70 calories each. Over the years eggs have received a bad rap for their cholesterol content.

Each week a nutritionist from the University of Maryland Medical Center provides a guest post to The Baltimore Sun's health blog Picture of Health (baltimoresun.com/pictureofhealth), which is reprinted here. This week, Elaine Pelc weighs in on eggs. Are eggs really incredible? Yes! Eggs are affordable, a great source of lean protein, full of vitamins and minerals and low in calories, weighing in at about 70 calories each. Over the years eggs have received a bad rap for their cholesterol content.

Moonstruck is a great food movie. Nicholas Cage on bread, the making of eggs, the great meeting scene in the restaurant with Olympia Dukakis and John Mahoney. Moonstruck opens the 13th Annual Little Italy Film Festival tonight. By the way, I'm looking for a good photograph of those eggs. There are lots of recipes online. My favorite thing in the whole movie is Loretta Castorini's take on the Marc Chagall: " It's kind of little gaudy, don't you think?"

I would like to know if anyone still darns socks. Please call and leave your name and number at 410-332-6166. It's for a study I've launched — how many Americans darn socks in the 21st Century. Please specify if you've always been a darner or if you've taken up the craft since the Great Recession. That's important to the study. Of course, if you're of a certain age, you don't even know what I'm talking about. In downloading the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby," you might have heard reference to Father McKenzie "darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there.

A New York company that makes vanilla rugelach sold in Maryland stores is recalling the product because it contains undeclared eggs, which may cause a life-threatening illness if consumed by anyone with an allergy or severe sensitivity to eggs. Bloch's Best Inc., doing business as Laromme of Monsey, N.Y., is pulling its Laromme brand vanilla rugelach because the 14-oz. round containers do not list eggs among the ingredients. The product was distributed in stores in Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey, according to the release posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website.

At midnight, the house smells of vinegar. On the kitchen table dry eggs dyed red and green and lavender and a blue as bright as a sky in early spring. The cat licks a purple paw, and I puzzle how to mail eggs out to Ohio, and why.The head of the household has gone to bed, shaking his head. Cards and calls are his way of keeping in touch with college-age children, who come and go as they always have, but in longer and longer leaps. For months at a time, we live here and they live there. They sound plaintive when they call, wistful when they write.

To many people, spring means Easter and that means eggs. Here are some safety tips for those planning to dye Easter eggs:* If you hard-cook eggs that are at least a week old, you will find them easier to peel after they are cooked.* Be sure to refrigerate eggs you plan to dye as much as possible between cooking, cooling, dyeing and hiding. Do not eat cracked eggs or ones that have been out of the refrigerator for more than two hours.* If you plan to use the decorated eggs as a decoration and they will be unrefrigerated for several days, cook extra eggs for eating and discard the display eggs.

When it comes to the latest salmonella scare, it's the eggs that are causing most of the confusion.By this time most Americans are aware that 30 percent or more of the country's poultry probably is contaminated with some salmonella bacteria and thus must be cooked thoroughly before eating, according to government estimates. But there aren't many people out there craving raw chicken.Not so with eggs. Raw and partly cooked eggs are essential ingredients in homemade mayonnaise, hollandaise, Caesar salad, ice cream, egg nog, mousse and meringue, not to mention those three-minute, soft-boiled eggs and the sunnyside-up ones with the runny yolks.

The Gallaghers still miss Betty White and wistfully recall how much the Silkie loved to be held. The hen, who was named after the 90-year-old celebrity because she was "ditsy and really out there" like many of the actress' TV characters, was killed by a fox last fall in the Glenelg family's backyard. "We normally don't name our chickens so we don't become too attached," said Karinna Gallagher, an IBM employee who works from home and who witnessed the attack but couldn't stop it. "But Betty White was such a flighty bird who didn't care about the pecking order.

Easter baskets in hand, or whatever they had to hold their eggs, hundreds of children lined up in Tydings Park Saturday for the annual Easter Egg Hunt. Sponsored by Havre de Grace Parks and Recreation, the hunt kicks off promptly at noon. The small plastic colored eggs are "hidden" throughout the park, some easy to find, some a little more obscure. Some dressed in their Easter best, children of all ages from all over Harford County and beyond scramble about to collect as many eggs as the can. Then the "hunt" is over almost as soon as it starts.

Montrease Lamback of Gwynn Oak stood on the sidelines and snapped photos as her 2-year-old son, Tyler, slipped plastic Easter eggs into his green felt basket. The eggs secured, Tyler pulled them back out, tossed some on the ground, handed a few to other children and then stopped midhunt to admire what remained of his colorful collection. The adventure for Tyler and hundreds of other children Saturday was part of the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore 's annual Bunny Bonanzoo.

Our Savior Lutheran Church is hosting a communitywide Easter egg hunt Saturday, April 7 from 10 a.m. to noon at 13611 Laurel Bowie Road. 301-776-7670.

One thing about the weather: We haven't figured out how to control it, so you never know what's going to be emanating from the heavens on any given holiday. Easter's no exception. We've turned blue (nearly) in Massachusetts in our new bonnets, light jackets and patent leather shoes. We've stripped down to shorts and tank tops to gather melted, ant-infested chocolate eggs in Florida. Thankfully, Easter in Maryland tends to offer weather most of us can handle. Cool enough to get the kids into Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes (even if they're not totally frou-frou dresses or cute little suits)

Give anyone age 40 and older a time machine and they would likely go back to their early 20s — to open an IRA. That's because by 40, many of us have learned the miracle of compound earnings over time. We kick ourselves for not socking away even tiny sums in a tax-sheltered individual retirement account when we were younger. Consider the math: A 22-year-old who invests $100 a month in an IRA for 10 years and then stops will end up with more money at age 65 than a 32-year-old who saves $100 a month in an IRA for 33 years.

A breakfast of eggs is a perfectly good way to start the day, scientists now say. Provided, of course, that you don't overdo a good thing.Eggs got a bad rap in the '60s and '70s when it was believed that cholesterol was the major cause of coronary heart disease. Now, the emphasis is on saturated fat and total dietary fat. And eggs, in moderation, are being rediscovered for their protein and vitamin content.The American Heart Association recommends that adults who don't have elevated cholesterol limit their egg intake to four a week.

Every time someone gives advice on how to avoid salmonella food poisoning, he or she suggests substituting pasteurized eggs that have been heated to kill the bacteria rather than the troublesome raw eggs.Good advice. But pasteurized eggs just haven't been readily available for the home cook locally.The wait is almost over. Table Ready Egg, a pasteurized and homogenized whole egg product from Papetti's Hygrade Egg Products Inc. of Elizabeth, N.J., should be in the dairy cases of Baltimore's major chain supermarkets right after Labor Day, according to president Arthur Papetti.

Don't miss Susan Reimer's story in Wednesday's Taste section on deviled eggs. It's not about making them yourself. It's about ordering them up in restaurants. They're quite the thing these days, and Reimer's story takes in the deviled eggs at Woman's Industrial Kitchen and Woodberry Kitchen, where Spike Gjerde is using a recipe borrowed, with a few tweaks, from his mother-in law. "Otherwise, it is just the classic mayonnaise, Gulden's mustard, salt and pepper," Gjerde said.  "And a tiny bit of fish pepper powder that we make here.