What are EGGS?

What are EGGS?

Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Or breakfast, dinner, and supper. It’s a logistics issue depending on the part of the country or world where you grew up.

So let’s talk food. What food can you honestly say is eaten in each meal in one form or another?

What food is a source of protein by itself or is combined with other ingredients to make something fabulous?

What food comes from an animal as a natural, daily function but can be disgusting if you think about it?

What is produced by this animal to the tune of over 9.3 billion dozen a year in the United States alone? (Note: that is 9.3 billion DOZEN, not individual units.)

9,300,000,000 X 12 = 111,600,000,000 units. And this is from 2020 and an approximation.

Eggs. Chicken eggs.

Now, unless you’re allergic to eggs, you are probably eating them in mass quantities and don’t even realize it. They’re in just about everything.

You had eggs when you had an omelet for breakfast (I know, duh…) and even some in the toast you ate with the omelet.

For lunch, you might have had a Chef Salad, and what’s a Chef Salad without a chopped up, sliced up, or cubed up boiled egg? Just another salad.

And who hasn’t had a sweet-tooth craving appeased only by a piece of cake, pie, or cookie sometime during the day? Guess what?! There are eggs in them, too!

Dinner (or supper, again, depending on how and where you were raised) might seem to be a little trickier when it comes to tracing a food or foods combined with eggs. But NOT impossible!

Ever had a plate of delicious, crunchy tempura? Egg wash.

Batter fried fish? Eggs in the batter, most likely.

What about the Southern staple of Macaroni and Cheese? Baked mac and cheese sometimes has an egg incorporated in the mix – not only for protein but for binding the ingredients together. See! They’re there!

I admire and bow to the many chefs who are very creative in their endeavors to utilize eggs in their amazing dishes!

Separating the whites and yolks to make the perfect hollandaise sauce (never had it myself – it’s going on my list of foods to try) is an art in itself. Whipping the whites up to fluffy peaks forming the amazing macaron (again, going on my ‘to try foods’ list), chefs are geniuses in my book!

So, curiosity got the best of me. I thought I’d see how many ways I could come up with to eat, prepare, or use an egg without checking Google first. How many times have you seen your FB friends post a silly challenge stating, ‘YOU CANNOT USE GOOGLE! Well, here’s my self-challenge:

To Eat or Not to Eat:

1. Raw (ugh)

2. Boiled

3. Fried – this requires a sub-category

a. Sunny-Side Up

b. Easy Over

c. Hard Yolk

d. Runny Yolk

4. Shirred

5. Scrambled

6. Poached

To Prepare or Not to Prepare:

1. Again, raw (no ugh this time)

2. Separated

3. Whipped

To Use or To Use As:

1. Sliced and Diced in a salad

2. With condiments for an Egg Salad

3. Between bread with mayo for a sandwich

4. On top of a killer burger (this requires a runny yolk, of course)

5. Dropped in a hot soup base

6. Coating for anything to be deep-fried (!)

7. With a little flour for a quick bread

I’ve covered maybe one-tenth of the total uses, edible delicacies, and preparation techniques for the amazing and versatile egg, besides the fact that this is only concentrating on chicken eggs.

Just off the top of my head, let’s see how many other eggs the world eats:

1. Quail – cute, petite & quite fashionable

2. Ostrich – can feed a whole village at once

3. Duck – fertilized or not (I refuse to go there, even though it’s a delicacy in some countries)

These are only a few of the types of eggs we humans have consumed.

Thank you for coming this far with me! The topic is so vast, and we can go into way more detail, but to keep this article short and fun, I’m going to end it here.

If you want more information or want me to expand on the subject, let me know! I love to research, and I love to write!

It’s truly egg-citing for me! (I know, the joke sucks, but I had to write it.)