Egg-celent

Many evenings, especially if I've eaten a healthier dinner, I tend to get hungry around 8 or 9 pm. It's not really an hour that you want to gorge yourself, so I'm always looking for ideas for light, quick, and healthy snacks. On more occasions than I can count, I'll pop myself some popcorn or eat a bowl of cereal. But I definitely need to start adding more ideas to my repertoire.

So I was super excited the other day when a positively egg-celent idea popped into my head: deviled eggs!

Impromptu one-egg snack

Recently, I've been seeing quite a few recipes for deviled eggs on some of the food blogs I read, so it's probably what inspired my idea. And I almost always have hard boiled eggs on hand, which I store in this ridiculously cute ceramic dish. So it only took a few minutes to whip up my egg-ceptional late-night snack.

I keep raw eggs in their original containers and hard-boiled eggs in this pretty dish,
that way it's easy to grab a cooked egg whenever I want

I didn't really write down my recipe from the snack I made a few days ago, so today I decided to be more official about it. I started off with a recipe from Not Without Salt and adjusted it to fit my taste buds. WOW!! They were like a grown-up (and awesomer) version of the regular mustard-and-mayo filled deviled eggs I'm so used it.

Capers and celery and watercress and dijon mustard add
salty and crunch and bite and spice

And don't you love my gorgeous deviled egg-cessory?!? I keep it on my windowsill when it's not in use because it's just so damn beautiful.

Deviled eggs garnished with celery leaves and capers or some
spicy watercress makes them tasty and fancy

Not Without Salt recommended garnishing the eggs in a few capers and celery leaves. It was definitely tasty and gorgeous, but I found the capers a bit too overpowering in that case (I'd limit it to 1 caper if I was making them for myself). Personally, I loved topping my eggs with some sprigs of watercress, as they have a nice spicy bite to them. In fact, I preferred them with a heaping of watercress!

They make not look so elegant covered in so much watercress, but they were so damn tasty! 

So if you're looking for some food to bring to a party, or a late-night snack just for you, these suckers definitely fill the need. So now I've got at least 3 evening snacks in my rotation. Got more ideas?! Send 'em my way.

Yours in discovering egg-citing new snacks,
Jacqueline

Deviled Eggs, adapted from Not Without Salt

I love these guys because you can add/remove ingredients to suit your taste, or depending on what you have in the fridge. I loved the slight crunch the celery added, but they're definitely optional (along with the capers). 

3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced in half lengthwise and yolks removed
1.5 TBSP mayonnaise
3/4 tsp dijon mustard (like grey poupon)
1/2 tsp whole-seed dijon mustard
1/2 tsp yellow mustard
1 TBSP celery, diced fine
1 tsp capers, chopped
salt and pepper, optional (I think the chopped capers provides enough salt, but I tend to like lower salt on foods)

Mash together egg yolks with all the ingredients. Spoon the yolk filling back into the egg whites. Garnish with celery leaves, capers, watercress, a dash of paprika, or whatever genius idea you have.