(Sorry! There’s no pun worse than a lazy pun but that was just too easy to pass up.)

Prep for our next underground dinner – April 27, Downtown Miami – is well underway and we’ve been having a play with some fun new dishes. The menu is, as always, a closely guarded secret but I thought I’d give you a hint and share a little of today’s experiments. The final product will be a riff on one of these – I’ll post pictures of the finished dish in the week after the dinner.

I love eggs as a starter and almost always have at least one course that highlights just how perfect they are. Perfect if left to shine on their own and perfect if fiddled with just a little.

Today: stained eggs.

Lavender, rooibos and black tea.

Aesthetically, the lavender was the least successful – I had hoped it would have prominent purple or blue veins but it turned out more of a pale puke-green. Not great to look at and probably not great to serve as a first course to people that have never eaten in my home. But it tasted amazing. Seriously. I don’t generally like lavender as a food flavor, I feel it’s more of a soap or potpourri ingredient but I decided to give it a go and I loved it. I paired it with charcoal salt from FalkSalt, in part because I had a mental picture of a blue veined egg on a board complimented by a pile of soot-black salt (failed there!) and in part because I thought the mineral notes in the salt would pair well with the floral lavender. I’m working on the aesthetics, better pictures to follow if I get it right – in the meantime, this is what I’ve got so far.

The second pairing was a rooibos tea egg with lemon salt from The Meadow in NYC . A great flavor combination. And so pretty. Overall a success, I thought. I won’t change a thing.

Last was the black tea – not just any black tea, Fortnum & Mason’s Royal Blend, the queen of teas. Actually, I didn’t really think that through. Any black tea would probably work so basically I just wasted some really good tea leaves trying to make a hen’s egg taste like tea. It was by far the prettiest and paired really well with Maldon’s smoked sea salt flakes. Also, the Maldon salt has the nicest texture of the three I used – if we decide to go with the rooibos and lemon for next week’s dinner I’ll probably make my own lemon infused salt using regular Maldon salt.