Adventures in Gastronomy

Today I ventured past new horizons of taste sensation, where no tongue has gone before. Today I experienced the three egg omelet. It featured one (1) fresh chicken egg, one (1) preserved duck egg, and one (1) hard-cooked pickled egg.

I chopped up the duck and pickled eggs and saute them with some onion and a bird's eye chilli. As I added the beaten egg, I started experiencing some serious metaphysical doubts. Have these three types of egg ever shared a pan before in the history of the universe? Was I venturing into uncharted waters whence from no gastronomer has ever returned? But the batter was sizzling, and it was too late to turn back. I plated the monster along a nice piece of toast.

As a child my older siblings told me frightful tales. Tales of flavors that one cannot imagine, tastes so freakish that the human mind cannot comprehend them, and is thus driven to madnes. I had dismissed these stories as superstitions, meant only to frighten hungry boys, yet here I was face-to-face with a flavor concoction so scandalous that it could make the great Tarrare himself blush. Taking a deep breath, I cut into the omelet and took a bite. Some time later, I know not how long, I awoke to find myself lying prone on the dining room floor. A strange sensation was playing across my tongue. The sensation was not unpleasant, but simply so anomalous that my palette didn't know what to make of it. I decide to take another bite, and then another. I continued chewing as if possessed by some spirit or demon. Each bite was an entirely new experience. The taste, if it could be so called, simply did not fit into any classification of flavor that I have encountered, and without any supporting structure on which to build, my mind was unable to hold on to the memory of the flavor between bites. Once finished with my extraordinary meal, I meandered around my kitchen for an hour tasting everything I could get my lips on, in an attempt to return some normalcy to my confounded taste buds. Only a powerful cup of Turkish coffee managed to sooth the caterwauling of my discombobulated tongue.

While I did manage to survive my foray into the dark jungle of unknown tastes, I will now think twice before challenging the natural order of ingredients.

A Tasting Eggstravaganza!

I must apologize for the late update. I know how eggscruciating the wait must have been. You see, I've been waylaid by a terrible case of gastroenteritis. Apparently, I was supposed to used apple cider vinegar, not unpasteurized apple cider.


As you must have surmised, the egg tasting eggstravaganza was indeed held, and a panel of eggsperts did taste the eggs. The verdict: The eggs are eggstraordinarily edible,
and are certainly better than the Decatur's. They taste eggy, and vinegary, although the flavor of the various pickling spices does not really break through the shell.

They also turned a marvellous brownish, on account of the liquid smoke.

The best part, is that I am now immune to adenoviruses type 40, and can keep eating the pickled eggs to my stomach's content. Yum! I'll keep you posted.

So Eggscited!

The one months anniversary of the eggs is tomorrow. I will finally get to eggsperience their briny goodness. A panel of eggspert judges will be on hand to decide the fate of the eggs: to be digested in my stomach, or to linger at the bottom of my fridge for all eternity.

Millennium Egg.

Since the poll results were inconclusive, and seeing as I've already made it this far, I have decided to go for the full four week pickling plan. Making it through the next two weeks will be eggscruciating, so I'm kicking in the backup plan: yesterday I rode all the way to Smith street (up hill both ways) and purchased a case of thousand year old duck eggs at the asian market.

It scrambles the mind to ponder the fact that that the duck that laid these eggs was alive during the Song dynasty. These eggs have been around since before Marco “Pollo” got chummy with Kublai Khan, and before Kuo Hsi painted his Early Spring Chicken. This thought scrambles the brain even more when you consider that the Chinese have only been preserving duck eggs for the past 500 years.

These pidan were not as pretty as some I've seen, as they lacked the delicate diffusion crystal patterns, but the taste was eggsquisite.

Tea egg steak II

You may remember my previous attempt at a soy-sauce egg only produced what I would call over-easy results. Today I attempted to increase color and flavor, but ensuring a high concentration of soy-sauce, and I threw in some tea for good measure. Since I didn't want to use up an entire bottle of sauce, I cooked the egg in a double-boiler type contraption, (see Figure 1) where the outer vessel was full of boiling water, and the inner vessel was mostly filled by the egg (with a bit of extra room for tea and soy).



The eggsperiment resulted in more a more intensely colored vein pattern (see Figure 2), but in no perceptible change in the flavor. An added benefit of the double-boiler, is that the water temperature in the inner vessel never reached boiling, so the egg was not over-cooked.

More Egguinox fun.

This balancing trick, is actually very easy -- you just have to plan it a year and a half in advance (unless you know a faster way of making albumen evaporate).

Happy Autumnal Egguinox!

Legend has it that eggs can be balanced on their pointy end only on the spring egguinox. That is utter balderdash! You can also do it on the fall egguinox.

The guy at the store wanted to know why I was opening all of his egg cartons and laying the eggs on the floor. I told him about the egguinox, and even boasted that I could balance an egg on the tip of my nose. It turns out, though, that I couldn't actually do it, and now I've got egg on my face.

Arrrrrrrr!

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Take a final look at these cackle fruit, me hearties, before I see them to Davy Jones' Locker: