Friday, May 11, 2007

We've got EGGS! (Ostrich eggs, that is)

We hit terrible traffic on the way home a couple of days ago, so we stopped in Old Town to see if a grocery store there did in fact offer ostrich eggs for sale,
as advertised
. I parked the car, and Steve ran in, coming out a few minutes later with a goofy grin on his face.

Purchased:
6 quail eggs
2 goose eggs
1 ostrich egg

The ostrich egg wasn't quite as big as I thought it would be. I'd figured it would be about the size of a football. Instead it was a little bigger than a softball. In the photo below, you can see a quail egg, chicken egg, goose egg, and ostrich egg lined up for perspective. Apparently one ostrich egg contains the equivalent of two dozen regular chicken eggs. The cost of one ostrich egg: $20.

Exhaustive Web-searching turned up only two real ways to cook them: scrambling or boiling. The boiling seems to take anywhere from 90 minutes to 3 hours, and you have to continually turn the egg so it cooks evenly. Once it's done, you slice it up and you can put the slices on a sandwich or eat them with various sauces suggested online. The scrambling option seems quicker, but results in a LOT of scrambled eggs.

Luckily, the giant egg won't go bad for months and months, so we have time to decide.

I am a little worried there will be an ostrich in there. For that reason, I don't intend to witness the cracking of the egg's very hard shell.

Steve did cook up his quail eggs already. He's eaten quail eggs before, raw, on sushi, but never cooked. He fried them up and made quail eggs benedict. He reports that it tasted like regular eggs. To the left, a plate of fried quail eggs, next to a pen for perspective.

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