Life Goes On ... Time to Crack the Egg

On Saturday, Steve cracked open the ostrich egg. It was an adventure just opening it up. First Steve tried a knife. That was unsuccessful.

Next he started smacking it with a spoon. Breakthrough! (left)

It filled a large portion of a big plastic bowl. I offered Steve the Kitchen-Aid mixer, but he thought that was overkill. So I whisked it.

And whisked it.

And whisked it.

Meanwhile, Steve pulled out the largest frying pan we own, a wedding gift from one of Steve's coworkers. The card had advised me that if Steve gets out of line, I should hit him with the frying pan. Steve prepared the pan with some beech mushrooms, green peppers and onions.

Half of the egg filled the frying pan to capacity. Half of one egg! In the end, Steve ate three large breakfasts from one ostrich egg over the course of the Memorial Day weekend.

Steve reported that the ostrich egg tasted like a regular egg. The findings of our exotic egg project are that duck and goose eggs are the richest. A future experiment will involve using duck eggs in creme brulee.

Below, one-third of the scrambled ostrich egg, some bacon and toast.

T-Minus 48 Hours and Counting...

... to the cracking and scrambling of the ostrich egg.

Stay tuned.

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.