Healthy Egg Salad with Yogurt, Olives and Scallions

There's egg salad with mayo, which is just normal egg salad, and then there's another kind of egg salad, a healthier person's egg salad, an egg salad that may make egg salad traditionalists recoil in horror: egg salad with yogurt.

Well, think about it. Yogurt (especially low-fat Greek yogurt) is healthy. Eggs are pure protein. Combine the two and bam: you have a tasty alternative to the gloppy mayo-rich egg salad your grandmother used to eat by the spoonful. The yogurt adds a unique tang and binds things together in a way that almost makes you forget the mayo. Almost.

Start by hard boiling your eggs: drop them into a pot, cover with cold water, bring to a boil, turn off the heat and cover for 12 to 15 minutes. Then, pour out all the hot water, add ice and cold water, crack the eggs a bit and let them sit in the cold water for 5 to 10 minutes. Peel them under the faucet and then chop them as you see above.

Now: bring on the yogurt!

Learn from my mistake: I added too much yogurt. Start by adding a little. Also, a squeeze of lemon juice. And, if you have them, pitted kalamata olives which you should chop a bit. Oh, and just for the hell of it, a splash of leftover rosé from last night's dinner.

Let's zoom in before we stir.

Add a pinch of salt and pepper, keep stirring, then add some chopped up scallions and parsley. At this point, I planned to make a sandwich but the whole loaf of bread I'd bought only a few days earlier was moldy. Moldy, I tell you! So I turned to crackers and sprinkled everything with piment d'espelette (paprika will work just fine; smoked paprika would be even better).

What a delightful, healthy alternative to egg salad. Pat myself on the back, I will. Is it better than egg salad with mayo? No, probably not. But it's a viable alternative that maybe, just maybe, will pass muster if you sneak it into your kids' lunches tomorrow for school. If they come home enraged ("that was the weirdest egg salad ever!") you can blame me.