I have a couple easy and delicious sandwich fillings for you this week!  This one I got from one of my favorite people, Marsha of The Better Baker.  And her last name just so happens to be Baker – how cute it that?  Anyway, I bought her cookbook several months ago (she has a new one coming out soon, too!) and she made a list of her family’s favorite recipes in it for me.  This was one of the first one I picked – her description of it being the “best egg salad” sold me.

Usually I make my egg salad crunchy, with celery, red, green, and yellow or orange peppers mixed in.  I just like to have some crunch that boosts the nutrition.  But if I made enough for leftovers, it tended to get watery from the veggies and it’s a pretty loose salad to begin with because I only used Miracle Whip as the binder.  Although this one has absolutely no vegetables in it, it really is the best egg salad I’ve ever had.  It’s got a wonderful, creamy texture (the cream cheese is just brilliant here), and incredible flavor.  And if you serve it the way Marsha suggests, on toasted wheat bread with lettuce, you do get a very satisfying crunch.  I served mine on multigrain bread and thought it was just over-the-top wonderful.

Photo courtesy of Jaclyn H.

Another tip for this salad – to make easy work of the eggs, you can use a pastry blender as Marsha mentions in her cookbook, or you can try using a cooling rack! My friend, Jaci, introduced me to this idea and at first I thought I’d never try it, because chopping eggs isn’t that hard. But when it came to dicing up six eggs, pushing them through my cooling rack only took a few seconds and was a real time saver. Thanks, Jax!

Special Egg Salad

Printable recipe
Printable recipe with picture

1 (3 oz) package reduced-fat cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup reduced fat mayonnaise or Miracle Whip*
1/2 teaspoon sugar*
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
6 hard boiled eggs, chopped

In a small mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese until smooth. Add the mayonnaise, sugar, onion powder, garlic powder, salt and pepper; fold in the eggs. Cover and refrigerate at least one hour before serving. Will keep for several days in refrigerator.

*You probably won’t need the sugar if you use Miracle Whip since it already has sugar added.

Veronica’s note: Although my method of hard-boiling eggs probably isn’t the best one, it works for me: put eggs in a pan and cover with an inch of water.  Add several dashes of salt (I heard this helps with something, maybe peeling them, but can’t remember. I just do it out of habit.)  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-high and continue to boil for 15 minutes.  Carefully drain off water and fill pan with cold tap water.  Pour off water and fill again with cold tap water.  At this point you can add ice to quickly cool the eggs, or keep the cold tap water running so that the pan is continually being cooled. Once  the eggs have cooled to room temperature or lower, which shouldn’t take too long, you can peel them and continue with the recipe.

Recipe source: The Better Baker