Meerkat Prompts: Eggs
Eggs are quintessentially versatile, and something of a staple food across nations and cultures. They work on their own, in several different ways, and are an integral part of recipes for both sweet and savoury dishes. They are also simply rather yummy!
If you asked this meerkat for his opinion on the best way to serve eggs, I’d probably go with fried, though boiled also works really well, as long as the yolk is runny. I am less fond of hard-boiled eggs, though not against them. Scrambled eggs are my least-preferred option, and somewhere in-between are poached eggs, which are great, when done properly. Personally, I cannot poach an egg to save my life!
I think it boils down to (urgh) simplicity. Fried eggs are easy (or over-easy), Boiled eggs are pretty easy. Scrambled eggs don’t take a lot of effort. Poached eggs involve creating a vortex in the water and hoping the white doesn’t spin off into a chaotic mess. I’m sure there are easier ways to poach, but I don’t know what those are.
You can bake eggs in an oven, which as far as I can gather is similar to frying, except the egg is heated from above rather than fried from below. I have no memory of trying baked eggs.
There are other ways to cook them, and certainly plenty of ways to incorporate them into other meals. Omlettes come to mind. Eggs are an essential element of quiches. They also form a vital component of other recipes, including plenty of sweet treats!
I am not a great lover of custard, though sometimes I do rather fancy it, and custard is definitely an egg-heavy product. Meringue is all about egg whites, whipped into a foamy consistency. Egg custard tarts take the custard idea to a whole new level (and they are pretty good). Sponges and cakes incorporate eggs to varying degrees.
Eggs are great, cracking even (I will not stop the puns, not sorry), but it’s peculiar isn’t it? How did we, as a civilisation, decide that this small oval object that’s popped out of a chicken (or a duck, or some other fowl), should be cracked open, and the contents eaten? Then again, I suppose how we came to eat anything was all about trial and error for a long time. Perhaps desperation drove our ancestors to see what an egg was like, and from there, further experimentation led to all the unique ways of using eggs that we know of today.
What are your favourite ways of using eggs?
‘Kat Comments