Get a street map of the San Francisco Peninsula. In Palo Alto, find the intersection of University Avenue and Alma Street. Using that as the center, draw a circle with a five-mile radius. Or even better, draw an ellipse with a major radius of five miles and a minor radius of one. Tilt the ellipse sixty degrees west of true north. Within that ellipse is every place that I have lived for my whole life, except for when I was away at school or traveling for work. That’s sixty-four years of living within five miles of the same point on the earth.

This doesn’t mean I’ve never been any place. I list eighty cities around the world on my Facebook “Cities I’ve Visited” page. There’s more, but I got tired of adding them with the clunky interface. But having lived so long in this area does mean that I’m definitely a “left-coaster.” You could even call me a Northern Californian, a San Francisco Peninsulan, or a Palo Alton since the last 42 years I’ve lived in this one town.

I enjoy traveling to the major cities of the world, and every October, my wife and I spend a five-day weekend in New York City. But, I’m not a fan of traveling to certain parts of the Midwest, the South, or even Upstate New York. The problem in these areas is that I have to watch what I say. I seem to be able to offend some people just by breathing. I can always find someone who doesn’t like me because I’m from the coast, or because I have a Jewish name, or because I’m (in their mind) a liberal.

So how is it that a few years ago I found myself on a Saturday afternoon in the social hall of a right-leaning Baptist mega-church in San Antonio, Texas? I was there to celebrate the fiftieth-wedding anniversary of one of my sister-in-laws. She and her husband were renewing their wedding vows. The hall was filled with all their friends and a couple of relatives. Their oldest son, Randy, had flown in from New York City. I came with my wife, another of her sisters, and her sister’s husband. Everyone else, friend or family, was a local.

Not everything was Texas-style. The “happy couple” was raised in Hawaii so the band entertained with Hawaiian melodies. The “bride” danced the hula as part of the ceremony. Leis were everywhere. All the men in the family wore aloha shirts. Randy and his high-school buddy Stuart spent much of the ceremony trying to decide if the pastor was a closet gay. I tried not to let my snoring get out of hand.

Some of the refreshments were purchased, but many were provided by the church ladies. (More than one reminded me of Dana Carvey with a Texas accent.) Randy had purchased an ice sculpture of a large clam shell that lit up and supported many pounds of shrimp. Each serving table, and there were many, supported one or more plates of stuffed eggs along with more stuffed plates full of other goodies. The egg plates weren’t just ordinary plates. Each had oval-shaped depressions to support and separate the eggs. Most, curiously, had thirteen depressions. I wonder why?

I managed to sample at least one egg from each plate. Some were good, but most were either too vinegary—probably from pickle juice—or too sweet—also probably from pickle juice—for my taste. I’m a purist. Egg yolk, French’s yellow mustard, Best Foods (or Hellman’s east of the Rockies) mayonnaise, salt, and pepper are the only ingredients required for a good deviled-egg filling. The mixture shouldn’t have too much mayonnaise or mustard—just enough. I like mine on the dry side. I give extra points for piping the mixture into the whites with a star-tip-equipped pastry bag. A little greenery on top is fine as long as it’s not curly parsley.

When I started to think about repurposing some classic comfort-food dishes as amuse-bouches, deviled eggs were one of the first dishes that I thought about. I remembered the “egg cube,” a plastic device for turning hard-cooked eggs into a cube shape. I thought about cooking the white and yolk separately into some layered, three-dimensional object. All my ideas really repurposed hard-cooked eggs, not deviled eggs. One day I was playing with quail eggs for another purpose and had a few left over. So they became my first effort at amuse-bouche-sized deviled eggs.

The first issue was how long to boil a quail egg. I place chicken eggs into a saucepan of cold water, set the pan over high heat, and cook the eggs for nine minutes once the water comes to a boil. I guessed that my quail eggs had one-eighth the mass and half the diameter of my normal eggs. That would mean that it would take one-fourth the amount of time for heat to reach the center of the quail egg. Also, because the mass of water was less in the small saucepan, but the heat source was the same, it should come to a boil faster. So I guessed at three minutes as the proper time. That seemed to do the trick.

After boiling, the quail eggs went right into an ice-water bath. They were inconsistent in their peel-ability. I wound up using a small pair of forceps to carefully grab the under-shell membrane and pull back the shell. In many of the cooked eggs, the yolk was not centered in the white. It was clearly visible under the white on one side of the egg.

The next problem was cutting them in half. Even though I was using a very sharp knife, they wanted to crush. The solution came in the form of a cheese “saw.” A regular cheese wire also worked, but the saw makes an interesting corrugated pattern. I tried to cut each egg so the thin white over some of the yolks was totally on one half. In these eggs, each one produced a good half and a thin, floppy half. Because of this deformity, each portion would require a whole egg instead of producing two portions from each egg, as is the case when chicken eggs are used.

I transferred the yolks to a small bowl. After a dap of mayonnaise, a smaller dap of yellow mustard, a few pinches of salt, and some very, very finely sliced, fresh oregano leaves were added, the mixture was mashed until smooth and well mixed. I used one oregano leaf, each about the same length as a quail egg, for each portion.

I pressed the leftover white halves through a fine sieve. This was set aside with the other pieces until assembly.

Because of the fragility of the assembled eggs, I constructed them in place on their individual serving spoons. With the help of a couple demitasse spoons, the cavities of each egg-white half was filled with the yolk mixture. A bit of the egg-white “dust” was put on top of the yolk, and this in turn received some more eggs in the form of a little pike caviar.

Since the deviled quail eggs were not stable structures that could withstand division with human incisors, I instructed my guests to eat them in a single bite.