I may have mentioned, at some point in time over the past year, that my wife is the chachki queen. The days when she arrives home with some new “absolutely necessary” kitschy/cute space taking device, that we just can’t live with out, are abundant.
We have the Melon Baller for the plethora of melons that we have never bought, let alone balled. We have the brushed stainless Coffee Bean Grinder for the gourmet coffee that we bring home from the store pre-ground. We have an Egg Poacher for the multitude of poached eggs that my love will never eat because she hates them.
It’s not that she has an aversion to poached eggs; it’s that she isn’t fond of eggs in general. On the days when I can talk her in to having one she will only eat them if they are prepared in two possible ways, either in a cheese omelet (so that the old cheddar drowns out the taste of the egg) or F.T.S. In case you are unclear what F.T.S stands for, the first two words are Fried To ...
I’ll let you fill in the rest Vanna.
If it’s dead and rubbery, it’s fit for consumption.
Me, I love eggs. Nature’s perfect food, I say. I like them boiled hard or soft, scrambled, omeletted, fried, devilled, steamed or foo-younged. I dip my soldiers in the yolk. I slide them on some rye. I firmly believe they’re what’s for breakfast, just as I equally firmly believe that they’re not just for breakfast anymore. Hell... you could sear an egg on the engine block of my car and I’d eat it. I talk of eggs the way Bubba and Gump talked of shrimp.
I’m the kid who brought an egg to school every day. I slice two or three of them up and cart them to the zoo with a baguette so that I can have a sandwich.
I like eggs Howard, so when Lee brought home the Maverick Henrietta Hen Chirping Egg Cooker And Poacher (phew), I knew that this was one useless item that would finally get some use, and despite some obvious design flaws it has. It’s not the egg poacher that I necessarily want but it is the one I have, so I drag it out about twice a month. It’s either use it or poach my eggs in water, soaking the English muffins and making sloppy, soggy Eggs Benedict.

The Henrietta Egg Poacher looks like a big white chicken with a red comb, yellow beak and full, lush, tail feathers. When you take the top half of the chicken off, you see a cast iron heating unit that holds water and one of two possible removable plastic tray inserts. Plastic tray insert #1 is for boiled eggs and technically has enough slots that you can do up to seven eggs at once. The Egg boiler also has a small spike on the far right hand side so that you can pierce the egg’s shells and stop them from cracking.
Plastic Tray insert #2 is the Egg Poaching unit which sits on top of the boiling tray when the eggs are being cooked, and holds 4 eggs, each of which will be poached in a slightly oval (yet still abstract and asymmetrical) shape.

It is easy enough to use. Fill up the base with the proper amount of water, plug it in and when the eggs are steamed properly, Henrietta issues a “Chirp, Chirp, Chirp, Chirp,” to let you know that she’s done. If you can’t hear, there is a yellow light on the front that will blink off.
Not sure how much water to use? Not a problem. Inside the base are three levels with instruction written in English, Spanish and, for some odd reason, Norwegian... not that I’m saying being Norwegian is odd... I just think there are more obvious languages they could have used.
Hard Boiled Eggs/ Huevos Cosinados Duros/ Hardkogt should take you about seven minutes.

Here are the two main problems that I have with Henrietta and the reason why she dropped a few stars (other than the fact that she’s a big plastic chicken and can run you up to forty bucks if you aren't careful), 1) Henrietta only fits seven eggs if you buy regular sized. I don’t. Eggs come in a variety of sizes and, as I may have mentioned before, I like eggs. I usually pass by the regular, skip over the large and hesitate over the extra large before I pick up a carton of the jumbo 747 sized eggs. I would buy the double yolks but... well I mean come on... I’m not a total pig. So as a result, Henrietta only boils four at a time for me. Also, it should be mentioned that because I like larger eggs I had to experiment with the water levels.
2) The other problem I have is a pretty common one. The poaching tray isn’t really non-stick. Oh, the eggs slide out easy enough the first few times, but after a while it gets a bit harder to clean and you need to scrub more. Once you do that, you have to spray the poacher thoroughly with PAM or some other cooking lubricant. The instructions say that both the poaching tray and the egg boiling tray are dishwasher safe but I still haven’t met a dishwasher that takes stuck egg off anything.

In general I like Henrietta (her chirps have a good beat and you can dance to them) and I’ll recommend her, but I can’t shake the feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong with cooking eggs inside something that looks like it laid them, sort of like grilling a steak in a large cow-shaped barbecue. I wonder if I’m going to have to spend a few years in purgatory for my enjoyment of them. Still it could be worse I suppose, my loving wife could have grabbed an egg poacher that needs to be used in the microwave. That would have been completely unacceptable. I’m not a total savage.

p.s. Always the pinnacle of good taste, Maverick also makes an all important Hot Dog steamer shaped like a (you guessed it) dog.


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