Two Year Old Egg Salad

“Why haven’t you gone to bed yet?”  Bob scolds me from the kitchen as though I were one of the kids.  I should have gone to sleep two hours ago. I’m trying to understand the price of an egg salad platter. The cafe opens on this Saturday, and I need to figure out what’s going to be available for me to cook (without an oven yet…but coming soon!), and how much to charge for it.  In addition to the soup and pastries, we’ve decided on egg salad, straight up:  it will be made from our eggs, seasoned with parsley from the potted herbs that are outside the cafe, along with spring onions from the farm down the road, on a bed of fresh-picked Boston lettuce.  It will be topped with bacon from our pigs, which Dad smoked with our own maple syrup.  Along side it, we’re offering a selection of our homemade pickles. I’m serving the egg salad platter next weekend.  I started cooking it last summer.  As soon as we decided we’d open a cafe, I went down to Barbers’ farm stand and bought up extra beets, onions and cucumbers.  I spent hours last July and August making pickles so I’d have them for the cafe this year. We started growing the hens that will lay the eggs for this week’s salad the winter before last. It takes two years to make a decent egg salad. And I’m sitting at the computer, tallying up the cost of buying the produce, the