The Best Egg Salad



Egg Salad Sandwiches ... the stuff my childhood memories are made of.  Although my mom's version of egg salad was as simple as it got ... hardcooked eggs, smashed with a fork, add heaping tablespoon of miracle whip and put between two soft pieces of white bread.  White bread ... remember white bread?  What every child's sandwich was made of when I was a kid. Unless you were lucky enough to be spending the night at grandma's house, where she still made bread from scratch. There was no such thing as 9 grain bread.  You pretty much just had the one choice - unless mom was thinking healthy and got a loaf of Roman Meal bread, but that was as eccentric as it got. And the only brand of white bread I remember having was Wonder Bread.  You just can't find bread that "soft" anymore.   And this was also back in the day when they didn't worry about keeping things refrigerated.  (Memory: there was NOTHING like the taste of a bologna sandwich with miracle whip after it has sat in your Elvis lunch pail for four hours - seriously - it tasted GREAT!)  Oh, but I digress.  We were talking about egg salad, weren't we??!! 

Anyway ... here's my absolute favorite recipe for egg salad:

One 3 ounce package of cream cheese with chives, softened

2 Tablespoons butter, softened

3 Tablespoons finely chopped celery

4 Tablespoons mayonnaise (the real stuff - not miracle whip) (more or less depending on how "wet" you like your egg salad)

1 tsp. grated onion

1 tsp. sugar

1/2 tsp. horseradish

1/2 tsp. lemon juice

Salt and papper to taste, and a dash of garlic powder for good measure.

6 large hard-cooked eggs, peeled and chopped fine

Combine cream cheese and butter; stir until smooth. Stir in celery, mayonnaise, onion, sugar, horseradish, lemon juice, salt, pepper and garlic powder.  Fold in eggs.  Cover and chill for an hour or more.  When ready to serve, let stand at room temperatur for about 10 minutes before making sandwiches.  If mixture seems too dry, add a bit more mayonnaise. 

Yet another version I make of egg salad does use Miracle Whip, adding 2 tablespoons sweet pickle relish, and a squirt of prepared mustard to my smashed eggs, then adding some dry dill weed to the mixture as well.

And mom also used to make egg sandwiches out of uneaten deviled eggs, which she made using the same ingredients as her egg salad (grin).  But deviled eggs deserves their own blog post, so expect to see that sometime soon.

So what do you put in YOUR egg salad?