Truffled Egg Salad with Tarragon

There is a great lunch place in town called Local Foods that offers inventive sandwiches made from locally sourced ingredients. A good friend of mine whom I often meet for lunch there orders the truffled egg salad sandwich every time we go. I have to admit I have never ordered it. But the last time we were there, he insisted I taste it. One bite and I realized I had been missing out.

Who knew truffle oil could make such a difference in a basic egg salad – my egg salad sandwiches will never be the same.

So, I have a funny story to share about the sandwich photo in this post. I can laugh about it now but when it happened it didn’t feel nearly as amusing. Like most food bloggers, I work at home and set up my “studio” wherever I can get the best light. It is not always the ideal situation but it works (most of the time). My usual set up is a card table on which I lay various boards to create the look of interesting tabletops and walls. On this particular day, I was using a marble pastry board as the backdrop and had the board leaning against a stack of books for support. In retrospect, I should have also attached some clamps to the bottom of the board to help it stay upright. You see where this story is going, don’t you?

Now, imagine me accidentally bumping the table just enough to send the board tipping over. The board, of course, hit the glass and sent orange juice spraying EVERYWHERE. Me, camera, tripod, window, floor, light diffuser … pretty much everything in the general area got hit with juice. Remarkably, the glass didn’t break. Not having to worry about small shards of glass on top of the sticky mess was a small consolation.

I am sure I will still be trying to get orange juice out of all the nooks and crannies of my tripod for the next several months. At least the sandwich was spared. Ruining a creamy egg salad laced with truffle oil and fresh tarragon on a perfectly buttered and toasted pretzel bun would have been a real tragedy.