A little (Too Much!) Fertility in Spring

Ooooh, man. It's spring, fertility rite time, what could be more symbolic than eggs, ey?

Louella Hill is an awesome local green-sustainable-awesome type who is always working to foster connections between local growers and eaters: e.g., she started an initiative that got both a farmer's market onto the Brown campus and some local food into the the dining hall? Nice!

So Louella got us some fresh eggs. We branched out a little, species wise,and ended up with some duck eggs, which were a pale, almost Easter-egg green from the algae the quacks eat; some gigantic goose eggs; the requisite free range chicken eggs, and then one marble-sized weirdo egg, the outlier.

Thus, I'm making our dinner, admiring the perky and intensely color yolks from these fresh, wild heirloom eggs, and decide to throw in that last little one for yuks--now, I mean YUCKs! It shattered in my hand and splattered a reddish-gold yolk all over the place, and inside the shell was what any kid who's been through 7th grade biology can identify: the universal embryo. Bloody and all that. Eeeeek! I wanted to share my horror with someone,but my husband ran screaming from kitchen, refusing to look.

Coincidentally, a few days later, we had to go to New York for a schwanky book party. Schwanky as in name-brand vodka martinis and miniature hors d'ouevres including thumb-sized cuban sandwiches, and, er, more eggs! Deviled quail's eggs (the size of pencil erasers) and caviar. It made my poor husband all ~blech~ just to look at them (I had some of both, not bad!), even though I was the one who had heroically chucked the egg-mystery-animal-embryo thing into the trash ("That is NOT going into the compost heap," I was told; I guess it could attract egg sucking predators, I suppose).

I think I'll take a rest and have a few egg-free days.