Eggs

The Incredible Edible thing that makes you stop and think "I'm consuming a once living creature" far more than a tasty veal steak.

At least for me, anyway.

Or, the thing you associate with hunts. Hunts for little people. Embryonic animals hunted by embryonic humans. The image is compelling.

Every day on Provincial Cires is an egg hunt. The winners are the family members, and we win the privilege of eating them. For me, it is an especially sweetened victory over the two cocks I hate more than any other creature on the homestead. Take that you crowing bastard. I eat your young.

Maria and I discovered my passion for soft boiled eggs last month, and we've been soft boiling a dozen a week ever since.

We eat them in the most heart-healthy way: covered in salt.

We eat them with spoons. We eat them with our fingers. We peel them clean, or with hunks of white catching on the shell. I have become mildly obsessed with recapturing that one gleaming moment when I peeled off the whole of the white and held the yolk in my palm. The yolk that was entirely liquid and only being held together by a membrane.

Magic.

Laurentiu likes to tell us the best way to eat them is raw. Snap a nail through one side and out the other (air hole for flow) and suck away. I point out that this is how the dog eats eggs (if a chicken happens to plop one out within his reach). Laurentiu says: but he also eats the shell. Maria points out that many people in the village eat the shell. Lots of calcium. Might even gather shells to bake and the roll into a flour and mix it with juice. Very healthy. Good for the blood.

Good for the bones you mean, I say.

No, for the blood.

But -- calcium -- bones...

No, blood.

Ok.

Anyway, you can tell which eggs are going to be the softest boiled because they are darker in color. The darker they are, the thicker the shell. Also, if they don't peel clean it is because they are too fresh. Maria has tried working out a system of taking the eggs from the bottom of our collection bucket, but, it is a bucket, and made of metal, and the layers are pretty thick...

I suggest a shallower, maybe softer container. One of those reed baskets we use in the summer, maybe.

It doesn't matter, Maria says, if they crack I will go find more. The hens always leave more.

Indeed they do. They are everywhere. In wood piles, the bread oven, on the roof of my veceu, in dirt holes everywhere. In the winter though, the popular plopping site is in the cow shed.

Man, they are tasty. I hoard them after dinner so I can take them to school as a snack.

I'm going to have a heart attack at 35.