My Love / Hate Relationship with Eggs

I love eggs, I truly do, and I could quite easily eat them every day - although I don’t because that would be bad for me, if not a little obsessive.

Eggs are so versatile and it’s not until you start thinking about them that you realise the extent of their culinary possibilities - fried, poached, scrambled, boiled, omelettes, quiches, frittatas, Benedict, cakes, sauces, biscuits, meringues, egg mayo and fresh mayonnaise if you’re brave enough.

You can also get pleasure from them when not eating them - painting them and rolling them down a hill at Easter, watching your hubbie clear them up when you accidentally drop one on the floor (same category as cat puke) and teaching your grandmother to suck them.

Then there’s the Fabergé egg - a thing of beauty if you like that sort of thing.

And, of course, the totally amazing egg that turns into the cranky teenage son who spends his life shooting zombies and eating.

There are nicknames for them too.  Living with an Aussie, I now know to call them bum nuts (a nut which comes from a chicken’s bottom?!) and cackleberries (the berry from the animal which cackles).

But as much as I love them, they can also drive me mad.  When I’m hungry, I take the advice of a very close friend, “You’ll be fine if you’ve got an egg inside you!”  Trouble is when I’m hungry, I want an egg inside me QUICKLY!  That’s where my problem with them starts.  And it’s the BOILED ones that cause all the problems.

OK, so it cooks nice and quickly with no real washing up to contend with but then comes … the peeling!  If you don’t manage to crack it in the right way and grab the first little bit of skinny membraney thing (technical term) you’ve had it!  The first grab of shell determines the outcome of the entire egg - often ending up with half a manky egg inside me.

I’ve tried everything - peeling hot, peeling cold, talking to the egg to make it my friend, positive affirmations.  But rarely do I end up with a good egg.

The boiled egg has even prompted two separate spats in our house - one with my husband and one with my mum.  Husband, whilst peeling some eggs I’d boiled and having the same struggle with them as me, asked, “How did you cook them?”  What’s a girl to answer?  Suffice it to say, my response is not printable.  Then my mum, in another egg-shell battle said, “Well, I never have this problem - what sort of eggs are they?”  Again, answer unprintable but I assured her they weren’t from a dinosaur.

So there you go, my fight with the evil bum nut continues and the day I get a perfect boiled cackleberry rolling around on my plate, I’ll be sure to blog about it.

But only after it’s inside me.

Why not check out my novel, Diary of a Mummy Misfit?  On Amazon for Kindle or PC.

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