Eggs

We are beginning to create our home. As we nest into our space we slowly add pieces of furniture, hang bells and tapestries, light candles and put flowers in vases.
We also fill our refrigerator and pantry with food. I do not truly feel home until I have chocolate, butter and eggs. These are the three ingredients I need most for anything nourishing and until they have found their way into my cupboard, I am restless.

I find solace in eggs. They are extraordinarily adaptable, mixing their way into anything sweet or savory. They can be dropped in soup, mixed in cookies, they can be fried, scrambled or poached, they can be beaten and whipped and still hold their own. With eggs in your fridge, the world begs a creation.
So last night we experimented with eggs. We bought quail eggs for the first time!

Aren't they just beautiful?!

I had never quite understood why anyone would eat a quail egg, but they were relatively cheap at the magnificent Berkeley Bowl and so we decided to experiment. We boiled them for 4 min which seemed to be the perfect amount of time for a "barely hard" boiled egg. They are so cute and make the sweetest little boiled eggs, but I could hardly notice a difference in taste between this and a chicken egg. 

I concluded that they are beautiful and quaint, and appropriate for garnishing a salad or toasted rye bread with gruyere cheese on top. 

We had also heard that if you take an egg and encase it in a long sleeve shirt, and spin quickly, the egg will scramble within itself. Then after boiling, you can crack the egg and have a pre-scrambled egg. 

Although obviously a fun and exciting trick, our efforts were proved mute and our scrambled boiled egg turned out to be simply a "harder than usual to peel" regular egg. Perhaps we did not spin the egg fast enough, but either way our efforts turned out to be in vain. 

Eggs are entire worlds encapsulated in a fragile shell, but are also strong and hearty and hold their strength. I love eggs. I think they are incredible and an endless source of experimentation and nourishment. 

If left untouched, eggs would eventually hatch and fly. Let us then too hatch and fly and remember that we too can be coaxed into incredible things. Let the soft world of an egg in our hand remind our own hands to be gentle with themselves. Hatching is not always easy, and half the time we are thrown into a boiling pan of water. So too will our hearts be thrown into hot pans, but let us hold up against the heat. We too are meant to fly. So lets eat our eggs, fill our bellies, and throw our shells to the ground!