My aunt is a great lady and very generous. Unfortunately, she and I do not have the same tastes. She tries to manipulate me into certain styles by purchasing me clothes when she is out shopping. I try to tell her I don't wear lemon yellow or safety-worker orange, but somehow each year she has visited, she has found something in polar fleece to buy for me. I wear it one day in her presence, and when she goes home, I send it to Goodwill.

I also don't like eggs. Thus, this week I became the recipient of several gadgets whose singular purpose is the perfect preparation and presentation of eggs. Through my aunt's generosity, I received an Egg Timer. While this one was not purchased at Cooking.com, it is exactly the same style and model. It was purchased at a kitchenware store in the local outlet mall.

As gadgets go, this one is pretty nifty. It has no moving parts and nothing to break. It's got a flat bottom, but otherwise is egg shaped. It looks like cast resin. The base contains a red background and white text. The text is on separate lines and reads:

Soft
Medium
Hard

Using this timer, you can get your eggs perfectly to any of these stages. Whether you start out with eggs in cold water, or putting the eggs into already boiling water (I'm a cold water start person); whether you boil them hard all the way through, simmer them, or turn off the heat once they hit a boil...none of this matters to the timer. As long as you have the eggs and the timer in the same length of time, it's going to work.

To use the timer, just keep an eye on the color changes it goes through. It will begin to turn a darker red, then purple, then brown. When the purple part reaches the line for soft, you have soft boiled eggs. When the purple part reaches the line for medium...voila! medium boiled eggs. Hard boiled is when the whole egg turns purple. The one caveat here is that hard boiled eggs should be shocked in cold water to stop their cooking since most things you will do with them will require them chilled anyway.

As I said before, I don't like eggs. However, this timer has allowed me to fix perfect soft-boiled eggs for my aunt who does like them. It also allowed me to hard boil some for chopping up in cobb salad and for making deviled eggs.

If you're a boiled egg eater, this is a great tool for perfecting the boiling.

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If you need to slice up an egg, check out the review of the other egg gadget my aunt bought me - the Pedrini Egg Slicer at http://www.epinions.com/content_91473350276




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