The Home Cook: Baked Eggs

In my life I've taken a grand total of one Home Economics class. It was required in 7th grade as part of the enrichment of the middle school student mind and enrich us it did! Sort of...kind of, I mean if you didn't know where your kitchen was or how to sew on a button or how to make a list it was quite enriching. For those of us who spent any amount of time with our moms and grandmothers who were for the most part vastly skilled on the home front, it was maybe a big fat waste of time. I made a pair of shorts with glow in the dark cows on them, was taught the proper way to measure shortening, how to prepare Ants on a Log and how to make a grocery list. All in all it was pretty worthless. The most worthless of all the tasks mastered in this semester of personal enrichment was how to bake an egg in the microwave.

Let's just ponder that for a moment...preparing a baked an egg in a microwave. Besides the obvious technical and semantic issues here, there are a lot of other pros and cons...

Pros:
- Cooks fast, two minutes or less fast.
- Any one of any age can run a microwave.

Cons:
- Eggs can explode in the microwave. Very messy.
- Little room for variation / experimentation.
- Oven use can limit users.
- Very bad final texture, rubbery only BEGINS to cover it.
- Stupid AND Lazy.
- Technically and Semantically one cannot "bake" an egg in a microwave. Ask Alton, he'd back me up on this one.

Ok, so maybe there aren't so many pros and maybe I'm biased, but I think cooking an egg in the microwave is just flat out lazy and stupid. (Which conveniently enough is also a con.) There is almost zero effort involved in baking an egg (This also holds true for scrambling an egg, poaching an egg or frying an egg, but not so much for making Eggs Benedict.) and the end result of firing up the oven and committing maybe 15 minutes of your life to the preparation of an egg is vastly superior to anything that can be zapped by 2,500 megahertz of radio waves in under 90 seconds. Though I will concede that there may be a time and a place for nuked eggs if a person is, say, in too much of a hurry to pre-heat the oven or if it's 100°F outside and it's just to dang hot to use the oven...but to that person I say, why in the heck are you baking an egg anyway?

Baked Egg, Hard Cooked because I'm a freak and don't eat whole egg yolks.

Basic Baked Eggs

Crushed Butter Crackers (Club Crackers, Ritz, Toasteds, ect.)
6 teaspoons Butter
6 Eggs
6 Tablespoons Cream or Half & Half
Salt & Pepper

Optional*:
Diced Ham
Paprika

Grease egg cups or a standard muffin tin; fill bottom of cups with crushed crackers, about 2 Tablespoons of crackers per cup. Place 1 teaspoon of butter on top of crackers in each cup. Break eggs, one per cup being careful not to break the yolk. Pour one Tablespoon of cream or half and half over each egg and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Bake in a pre-heated 350° oven for 10-15 minutes or until eggs are at desired set. If you prefer a hard cooked egg, bake for approximately 20 minutes.

For the optional addition of ham, press out the extra moisture from the ham. Sprinkle over crackers before adding egg, and sprinkle a bit on top of the egg before baking. Add 2-3 minutes to the baking time