When I was growing up, I always thought that I would become my mother. My mother who stayed home caring for my sister and me for fifteen years while we were growing up, as we seemed to haphazardly move to various U.S. mainland towns where my father’s U.S. Army career sent us. My mother who hung laundry out in the backyard clothesline where she would gossip across the fence with the changing cast of neighboring housewives. My mother who kept a clean household that had to be dismantled and reassembled every three years when a new duty station called.

     Mom always had breakfast, lunch, and dinner (I mean, “supper”) on the table. Breakfast before school, mush (oatmeal with raisins) or a fried egg, Vienna sausage and Wonder Bread toast with butter with orange juice and a glass of milk. For our school lunch, she would pack a tuna sandwich wrapped in wax paper and an apple in a paper bag. Every evening when dad got home from work at five p.m., we would all sit down and eat supper. A typical meal might be hamburgers, a casserole, or pork and beans with a lettuce salad with French dressing, boiled canned vegetables, and rice. We could always depend on mom’s food on the table. Even on Christmas morning, my sister and I complained because we had to “eat your mush before opening presents.” Whenever we got back to our parents’ permanent home in Hawaiʻi between mainland assignments, potluck was what gathered us together with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins at Auntie Doris’ home in Kaimukī for every holiday or to Sans Souci Beach every Sunday during the summer. Out came the hibachi for barbecuing chicken, teriyaki beef sticks, hot dogs. Out came the paper plates that we piled with rice, potato salad, hand-cut carrot and celery sticks with ranch dressing, Chinese fried noodles. Food was stability, food was pleasure, and food was love. Though my typical childhood meals could not be considered “gourmet cooking,” those childhood memories inspired in me the desire to recreate the comforts learned at my mom’s table.

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     My friend Rona and I lived in an upstairs apartment near UH that we shared with seventy-two-year-old Miss Frederick, a retired nurse who kept the kitchen stocked with breakfast foods and cooking staples that we were free to use as part of our rental agreement. As single college students at the University of Hawaiʻi, my roommate and I were known for cooking nightly full-course dinners together and inviting friends one or two times a week. I enjoyed meal preparation and all its mundane steps: menu planning, shopping, measuring, chopping, blending, sautéing, and the minutiae of making a satisfying meal. My friend and I also had fun impressing other classmates and stray university hangers-on, like Chet, the guy who helped out in aikido class, Will, the glass-blowing art student from Kona, or Henry, who used to work for US AID but was now the backbone of the dish room at the Gateway House cafeteria where I had a part-time job. I even aspired to become a nutritionist and to that end, I took a year or two of FNS (Food and Nutritional Sciences) and related classes.

     In my first-year meal preparation class, I learned the essential core cooking skills requisite to becoming a good cook/nutritionist. Besides nutrition, we studied the budgetary, time management, and aesthetic considerations for meal planning, cooking, and serving. Students were required to understand and prepare classic food and beverages and to explain the underlying scientific concepts. We had to explain as well as produce dishes in the canon of traditional foods. We brewed tea and coffee (pre-Keurig) with knowledge of the correct temperatures and timing. We studied the principles of producing batters and doughs, the process of whipping cream into tall, tender peaks, choosing fresh fish and meats, vegetables and fruits, and of course, recognizing the desirable qualities of and the various ways of using and preparing eggs.

     Now that I was living on my own, however, I found I could also adapt and expand on what I was learning and my mother’s home-cooking menu. Many nights I leaned toward cooking family favorites like teri chicken, beef stew, tuna casserole, chili with rice, but I could also choose new dishes. My home cooking allowed me to create menus with recipes and ingredients that I could alter to fit my personal preferences or the tastes and dietary needs of my guests: vegetarian, low-carb, non-allergenic, low-sodium, less sweet, lower fat. I found I could also create new dishes. I remember amazing friends by adding peanut butter to chicken breast pieces before I had ever eaten Thai food. I loved the sense of harmony and mastery cooking gave me, and I was nourished by the compliments and enjoyment of people I cooked for.

     It was at this time in college that I learned to love to cook, and specifically, with direction from my Introductory Foods textbook, the characteristics of the perfect hard-boiled egg (which was actually not a boiled egg). The term “hard-boiled” is not a culinary term. You hard-cook, never hard-boil an egg. A hard-boiled egg produces the image of a tough, foul-mouthed P.I. with its camo green-coated yolk. Instead, think of the hard-cooked egg: “The white of hard-cooked eggs should be firmly coagulated, yet tender. The yolk should be dry and mealy. If the yolk is waxy, it is not sufficiently cooked,” Introductory Foods told us. This crucial point was gently folded into my open mind by my wonderfully proper instructor and mentor, Miss Weddle.

     The highlight of my short-lived professional culinary career was the part-time job I obtained after doing a practicum at Gateway House Cafeteria on Dole Street. My job title was “breakfast fry cook,” and it was a job I loved so much that I continued to talk about it years later as “my favorite part-time job.” My main duties were making fried or scrambled eggs, breakfast meats, pancakes, or occasionally fried rice every Monday through Friday morning on a four-foot professional grill. Breakfast cooks have to get up early, and I used to leave my apartment at 5:30 in the morning, arriving on foot at the kitchen back loading dock before the sun rose. I could see the bright lights already burning. The full-time kitchen staff, including my boss Millie, were already at work preparing for the coming onslaught of sleepy, hungry students clamoring to grab a bite before rushing off to class. I would turn on the grill to get it warmed up, help with whatever prep tasks needed doing, and then it was time for me to take command of the grill.
I would fry up a whole layer of breakfast patties, little sausages or bacon strips, place them on warming shelves for servers to take out as needed. Sometimes I would dip ladles full of pancake batter in tidy columns and rows until their tan tops steamed and bubbled, flipping each one neatly. Sometimes I would pour a pitcher full of eggs, stirring and scrambling the steaming mixture. But my greatest joy was frying eggs. To prepare for the eventual scores of students that would be arriving, I learned to break fresh eggs with one hand, spacing them out like little planets across the universe of my grill. Eggs were a bigger challenge than mere pancakes. The whites had to be cooked until opaque, the yolks should not be runny, but must be sufficiently firm and round. I cannot explain why I derived so much pleasure working at the grill, watching those eggs transform as I prepared their movement from shell to grill to plate. The buttery fragrance of the oil on the grill was sweet and pleasant; the steam rising from the grill gave me a nice facial sauna each morning. Then when we finished cooking and the servers were done, cleaning the grill was satisfying. Scouring the grill with a sanding stone with warm steaming water, wiping the grill clean with a fresh white cloth, then spreading a perfect thin layer of oil left the grill top shiny and ready for the next day’s work.

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     Sadly, the unexpected burden of chemistry and calculus classes, distractions by my social life, and a lack of rock-solid study skills and motivation forced me to change my major the following year. I moved out of the house Rona and I had shared, moved into an off-campus student dorm with limited cooking facilities and no congregate dining space, and then, met a boyfriend who changed my life.

     Jeff migrated from the East Coast U.S. to attend UH and after graduating and had gotten a job working a rotating shift at HPD, at police dispatch. Jeff was kind of a sad sack character, the only son of a fatherless home. He lived in a cheapie basement studio that was then common in the university area. Jeff’s studio had no kitchen or dining area, so cooking full meals was problematic. Jeff’s rotating shifts made scheduling social or dining events extremely difficult. He was busily trying to save money while working at a job he detested and subsisting on the easiest and cheapest foods possible. A typical “meal” for Jeff could be a dish of cottage cheese topped by a red festive grape from the East-West Center cafeteria at the far end of campus. Jeff’s lack of interest in domestic life did not encourage cooking meals. To make matters worse, Jeff was only marginally sociable, so cooking and sharing dinners for and with friends was no longer the norm. The worst part was that Jeff never appreciated home-cooked food. Though our relationship, like my professional culinary career, was short-lived, my experience with Jeff dampened my enthusiasm for cooking considerably from then on. Jeff was the negative impulse that started the downward spiral of my love of cooking.

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     When I met my husband-to-be several years later, I still cooked enough to mislead Eric by my special occasion cooking, such as the Thanksgiving feasts that my housemates and I planned and executed together in the house we shared in Makiki. Eric and I met when we were involved as backstage theatre techies, though, and rehearsal and show schedules meant we had little time after our full-time job and class schedules to cook many meals together. Grabbing a filet-o-fish at the nearby McDonald’s was typical fare. But when we did cook, Eric’s appreciation of and enthusiasm for good food was refreshing. Eric actually won me over when he brought out the cast iron skillet and cooked a batch of his Sicilian Aunt Ida’s Italian sausage and meatball spaghetti sauce. Although I had abandoned my former love affair with cooking, I had not lost my love of eating, and I knew I could appreciate Eric’s hard work and skill for a long time.

     Once we were married, I cooked with gradually less enthusiasm over the years. A highlight was a birthday party I planned and cooked for twenty, held at our third rental, a rickety backyard cottage, when our oldest son reached the age of two. There were so many dishes: appetizers, fruit salad, a chicken dish, Chinese noodles, and more. The devilled egg dish involved taking out the old instructions and preparing those perfect hard-cooked eggs, cleaning and removing the yolks, then mixing them with mayo and spices before plopping them in lovely mounds into the boats of egg white. But times began to change. Two more children later, just when I should have been cooking the most, I began to seriously tire of the job. Maybe it was the fatigue of the daily three-hour commute to and from town, after we moved to the aspirational “Second City” of Kapolei, the only place on Oʻahu that we could buy a home. Our routine was to leave Kapolei before sunrise to miss the hours-long stop and go traffic, facing the rising sun that would start to shine directly into our eyes during morning rush hour. Then, in the evening, we returned to Kapolei either with the setting sun blinding our eyes, or in darkness after eating a quick bite at my parents’ home in Liliha, after Eric and I had finished eight-hour workdays, ferrying our children from home to school and back again. Something had to give, and cooking was a major one.

     For me, food preparation had become a rare and unappreciated undertaking. As a working parent commuting daily with three young kids, home-cooking felt like a time-sink drag to be delegated whenever possible to my retired parents and special occasions. Cooking for me was, like much of “woman’s work,” unpaid and undervalued, robbing me of valuable time from career and child rearing duties. After all, we could eat wholesome home-cooked food prepared by my mom at their place in town. Even my dad, now retired from the Army and a later gig at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, got into the act and London Broil became his specialty dish. On days when we were on our own, the family could survive on frozen gyoza, burritos, or fish sticks, or spaghetti from jars when we got home after our long ride home. In a pinch or to splurge, we could take the kids to favorite restaurants like Zippy’s, KFC, or Pizza Hut. We could eat Breakfast Burritos or Happy Meals in the car on the way into or out of town. We almost had to eat that way if we wanted to keep up all the life activities crammed into our crazy treadmill lives. We could even have our kids’ birthday parties at McD’s, Chuck E Cheese, Ultrazone Laser Tag, or Ice Palace, where the meals, the favors, and the entertainment were sometimes all-inclusive. We were living “life in the fast lane.” And it took a toll.

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     Eventually our children grew older and either moved out or onto independent schedules. Eric and I moved into my parents’ former home in Liliha after they passed away. We didn’t have to commute very far, yet I never found myself loving to cook again. We reignited our theatrical interest by getting involved with a local university theatre production. Rehearsals and working the shows was intense, still leaving us little time and energy for cooking. Eric did a lot of the cooking, but we still ate a lot of spaghetti or frozen burritos, or before the global pandemic lockdown, we ate out, far too often.

     But I still remembered the introductory food preparation class of my youth, and those perfect hard-cooked eggs. I seldom made them, but I thought about those eggs. When the 2020 global lockdown happened, we moved back to Kapolei again, and stayed home a lot. With Eric constantly immersed in Zoom meetings and writing software for work, long hours stretched out like open arms. Over time, old things we hadn’t done in years became possible and even appealing again.

     Somewhere on the back burner of my mind, I was still tempted by the memory of hard-cooked eggs. I began to ponder and appreciate the basic hard-cooked egg as a beauteous thing, a pure white, pastel gray, or speckled brown, unblemished, seamless shell, the perfect elliptical shape. Skillful removal of the hard outer shell reveals the inner albumen, also smooth, glistening, and pure white; no torn edges; no uncouth gouges interrupt the perfection of its form. The final, ultimate signal of achievement, the yolk. The perfect yolk is firm, bright yellow, with not a sign of gray-green film. Taste that egg; the albumen is firm, yet not rubbery, the yolk is tender, moist, but not runny. I even read up on how to cook the eggs again and found my wonderful magical Alcyoneus Rapid Egg Cooker. Advertised in Amazon.com:

Perfect eggs in no time

• Apart from boiled eggs, you can make poached eggs, omelet, scrambled eggs, deviled eggs, eggs benedict
• Couldn’t be easier to get perfect boiled eggs, as long as following the easy manual!
• Auto shut-off without obnoxiously loud buzzer/alarm when cooking is finished.

All detachable non-electric parts are dishwasher safe.

     My Alcyoneus Rapid Egg Cooker has been the perfect solution to preparing one of my favorite foods, and the results are almost 100% foolproof.

     Cooking eggs is close to the farthest perimeter of the solar system of cooking that bounds my life these days. But hope is not lost. After many years, something sleeping is stirring again. I have come once again to appreciate the joys of the basic hard-cooked egg. And with my new favorite appliance, I cook eggs with joy. Last night, I cooled the eggs in the refrigerator after their frigid water bath, then whipped one out and its shell peeled away in two irregularly shaped, but perfectly clean pieces. I peeled another one for Eric and sliced it into a multi-colored Caribbean Festive bowl along with Kahumana farm-fresh keiki greens, Ho Farm Roma tomatoes, and fresh blueberries. There has been other occasional cooking in my life. A new apple Sharlotka recipe, scallops broiled with garlic butter, and occasional other, mostly new dishes. The memory of old family-favorites dishes like Kalua Pork with Cabbage, Teri Chicken, Beef stew with rice, Pork chops with cream of mushroom soup have risen from ancestral memory. But attaining the perfect hard-cooked egg once again demonstrates order and mastery in my life. I am at peace knowing that I can reclaim cooking and that the harmony cooking represents can be part of my life once again. The return of the hard-cooked egg promises a rebirth of better times and a reminder to share time with the people I love. Lessons I learned throughout my life and at my mother’s table.