July 14, 2006

• I buy most of my eggs from the farmer down the road (about half way to Rocket88's place). Other than having brown shells and slightly orangey yolks, they are no different than grocery store eggs. I once believed that they tasted better, but I think I was just being an eggophile snob.
• Restaurant eggs taste better because someone else cooks them and a sexy wiatress brings them to me.
• I think he was plating a yolk on you, you know, pulling your l-egg? ARF! I slay me.
• playing, obv. shite
• He's definitely NOT pulling my leg.
• Order up!
• Restaurant eggs are made from reprocessed human souls. That's why they taste better.
• If it wouldn't be poaching, I'd like to pronounce a Benedict-ion on this thread. If you're shirred it wouldn't be intruding.
• Could they be a different grade: linky?
• Again with the Canadians and their farming with the hippity hoppity cows! Well it's not going over easy this time! Omlette the Canadian Advisory Board see this and see what they have to say!
• Ralph...if you're talking about the place on the south side of #7 between Guelph & Rockwood, then they definitely have better tasting eggs, especially if you get 'em early in the morning when they're still warm.
• Restaurant eggs might be treated for Salmonella infection? I know in the restaurants I worked (in the Netherlands we weren't allowed to use eggs in (non-cooked) desserts but had to use yolg and white that came in large containers. Very processed indeed.
• I like to catch 'em quiche from the hen. If she's an Iraqi hen, ye can ask for 'em Sunni side up.
• Rocket...No, I'm talking about the farm just north of Brucedale on 5th line. (if the rest of you would just move to this area, it would make things so much more simple...)
• maybe to make these messages more secure, we should scramble 'em.
• I get dressed for work every morning to my favorite local news and enteratainment show, "G'day Brucedale!" With my host, Michael Baldwin.
• Your friend inhaled too many egg fumes.
• Your friend is imagining things. The little white things in the albumen are called chalazae and are present in ALL eggs, though they can be more prominent in some eggs than in others. The bit about scooting yolks is just a matter of cracking them closely together and/or having a cooking surface that isn't level. I have no problem getting two eggs close enough together to flip "as one".
• It could also be the way the eggs are cooked. The eggs might be different, but when you cook eggs at home you get that runny bit? A good chef will sprinkle a little water on the egg white and cover it so the runny bit is cooked, the egg is as a whole more solid and the egg(s) are easier to flip. Although only a madman would flip eggs over, IMHO. You can cook the yolk through without flipping.
• I was told the chalazae meant the egg was fresh. Restaurant eggs might not be as fresh, or might be more-treated, or what have you. At school, eggs came in a carton. There were no yolks. I wonder if, yes, the cooking surface comes into play. Don't they usually cook on a big flat sheet of hot metal at restaurants, and one's usual frying pan is much smaller. It might have effects that are just idiosyncratic.
• Chalazae for Chutzpahs
• IF your friend is not joking, then he's an idiot. There is no difference between restaurant eggs & shop bought eggs aside from possibly their freshness and/or whether the hens were organically fed.
• "A good chef will sprinkle a little water on the egg white and cover it so the runny bit is cooked" You just splash oil from the side of the pan on it.
• Happy eggs: "free range," "cage free," "organic"—what's the story?
• As has been done for decades, food service suppliers deliver eggs to restaurants in cartons of a dozen, with two rows of six eggs. This may sound just like the grocery store, but there is a key difference: a small positive electrical charge has been applied to the yolks of the front row eggs, while a small negative charge has been apllied to the back row eggs. When a chef wishes to cook eggs in pairs, he simply chooses one egg from each row. When hitting the frying surface, the yolks attract.
• That is why IHop eggs always point North!
• When I was keeping a hen in the back here (one escaped from a nearby yard) I fed it daily on natural grain & protein (they need a lot of protein) & it had a lot of area to run about, eating grass & whatnot to please itself - its eggs tasted absolutely fantastic, & you could even see when they went into the pan that the white retained its form around the rich orange yolk. They smelt terrific as they cooked! The flavour was many times better than the bland shop-bought variety. I had a bout of very serious bronchitis & was very ill for about 2 weeks, so much so I was in bed for days, which is rare for me, & finally realised I had to eat something substantial because I'd been subsisting on ice cream, which is all I could swallow, so I made a quick omelette of 2 of these eggs (dizzy & woozy, clutching the kitchen table so as not to topple), ate it, & I *swear* to you, there was a dramatic improvement in my health over night. It was as if my immune system got a massive boost. The next day I was pretty much up & about, whereas before I was simply too crook to do anything. I swear by organic eggs, & I literally can't eat shop-bought eggs anymore, they just don't have any taste! I suspect that canny chefs would choose organic eggs over mass-farmed types for this reason, & it is true that the fresh organic egg looks significantly different to a crappy old normal egg, so maybe this is where the observation derives. It's true that raising hens for eggs is inherently cruel, however, in that half of the chicks are destroyed because they're male. I haven't come up with an adequate solution for that. Hens don't seem to mind if you take their eggs, however, as long as you give them some nice yummy corn. They also seem to really like rice (soaked or cooked of course).
• 
• It really doesn't matter if they're brown or white, it's how fresh they are and what the chickens have been eating, as Chy says. We've raised several breeds of chickens--no whites, but Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Islands, bantys, et al, free-range, and all of the eggs were yellow yolked and tasted wonderful. Why would chicken eggs taste good whey the hens are fed ground up animals disposed of from the vets after lethal injection, livestock carcasses covered in shit, sawdust, moldy grains pressed into pellets--ick. Additionally, google and see how long eggs sit around without refridgeration and how old they are by the time the consumer gets them--there have been cases where eggs can be as old as 12-18 months before they're sold. yolg and white Yeah, I hate yolgs.
• In the year 7342pa the Yolgs invaded Clemmerhaulf, and there was a great gnashing and binding of beaks.
• Well, we don't like stuck up sticky beaks here.
• Oh, and Chy, it looks like your holding that egg with your toes.
• YOU'RE aren't you?
• Take you and your opposable foot thumb back to the circus.
• I have very nice hands!!!
• Yes, you do, I keed. It's just the light in the photo has whited out your palm but I was having such fun thinking about a Chy Monkey with opposable toes!
• Apparently hens are fond of algae, too!
• hmmm, you noticed that. the water was clean, I just hadn't washed the bottom of the tub that day (it was rather early)
• Is that the hen that died?
• No.
• This was the second hen that turned up on my doorstep. I know, it's hard to keep up. I seem to attract animals, particularly birds. Two Aussie willy-wagtails made a wee nest in a tree literally right outside my door, you'd walk out & it would be right over your head, & they're divebombing you. I have a bunch of pictures of it & the babies that I've been meaning to put on Flickr but haven't cleaned 'em up yet. Very Lazy. They've already started this years nest in another bough.
• Both of my parrots love an egg breakfast. Matters not if they are fried, hard-boiled, scrambled or served as a single crock-bowl-microwave souffle (their favorite). I keep saying, hey, guys, YOU were an egg once! It doesn't seem to phase them. (when they eat chicken, which they do, we call it "cousin")
• is it ok for parrots to eat high protein foods like that? I didn't know they could digest something like meat. I read somewhere.. maybe it was here.. about someone with a budgie who would treat it with little bits of cheese.. is that ok? I had the idea that parrots were kind of delicate in regards to their digestive system, etc.
• Oh, hens will also happily eat their own eggs, if they break. They eat the shells, too, I suppose they are recycling the calcium.
• the FoxFire books or Mother Earth news had the old-fashioned way of recycling calcium instead of buying chips--save your eggshells, grind them up into smallish bits, bake them (so the chickens don't get into the habit of canibalizing the eggs for the taste of the yoke, and toss into the coop. You have to have a coop for when you need them penned--spring time seeding or small plants--but then if you free range them other times, you don't have to purchase grit, either. They need grit. Wassa matter, boy? Ya'll got grit in yer craw 'bout sumpin'.
• The best eggs I've ever eaten were purchased while I was staying on Whidbey Island a few years ago. The little market on the highway had a cooler in the back with a dozen eggs for about $2. The eggs were from a local farmer named... well, the name escapes me, I'll call him Bill. Bill apparently had an awful lot of chickens, all different sorts, because the eggs were all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and often had little bits of dirt and grass still stuck to them. The eggs were absolutely delicious. And, charmingly, came packaged in store-bought egg cartons, with the original brand name scribbled out, and "Bill's Eggs" written in black Sharpie marker.
• My African Grey will eat cooked chicken, a bit of flaked cooked fish, cheeses, cooked hen's eggs, and many other people foods. Her favorite food items are things like hard breads and breadsticks with sesame seed (she picks the seeds off and then flings the nasty bare breadstick down so the dogs eat it). Most of the larger parrots will eat an assortment of whatever their owners eat. Feeding meat and other high-nitrogen products needs to be done judiciously -- small amounts, and not every day. If you have fruit trees, fresh cut apple and crabapple branches are very good -- they will strip the bark off these and usually chew the wood. (Don't give them cherry or other toxic branches.) Smaller hookbills and birds often enjoy wild plants like chickweed, grasses, and the like. Any hookbill loves taking leaves off twigs - maple and other woods including pine are safe for them to chew. Among parrots, lories and lorikeets are far more restricted in what they can eat: there are lory nectars and lory pellets available, but these should be fed along with lots of ripe fruits, edible flowers like daylily, grated and shredded fresh vegetables, cuttlebone. Lories ... are all ... certifiably crazy. Not sane in the way of other hookbills, they will hunt and kill other birds if they come in contact with them. They are hotheaded, imperious, and completely impulsive -- fly into great tantrums and then tiurn the charm on in a split-second. Lories will pick up swearing and impassioned human utterances with remarkable facility (regrettably my red lory swears like a sailor on a whaler, long strings of dreadful things he's been told when he bites us, which he often does). In my opinion lories are very intelligent, but in a distinctive non-cooperative lory way. They are excellent talkers, but their ennunciation isn't as good as some of the larger parrots. They can acquire large vocabularies. I don't believe lorries forget much. (Most folk who keep parrots won't keep lories, partly because of their messiness and meanness, but I'm fond of these lkittle devils, all of which are seriouly endangered, being island birds from limited habitats that are all too vulnerable to invasive species and human intrusion.) Calcium deficiency among parrots and also among wild birds is a seasonal problem - birds can become rundown fast when laying; cuttlebone is excellent for them all. Parrots have relatively hard beaks compared to songbirds (canaries, finches, doves) and can eat it off the cuttlebone easily, but for wild birds scraping the softer white into wild bird seed is helpful if you don't have any eggshells. Eggshell can be cooked quickly in a bit of water in the microwave - needs breaking into small fragments for softbills. Hard cooked egg yolk is very nutritious for birds - mash it a bit, and don't let it sit out too long so flies or bacteria have their way with it. Commercial scratch feed for hens and chicks usually contains bits of eggshell or broken pieces oystershell.
• Two words why I don't have a lory: Projectile pooping. Enough said.
• Smaller parrot-type birds apparently tend to be crazy. A friend had a Weero which was alternatey affectionate & crazy-mean.
• Both of my parrots Ralph, I read that paragraph twice before I realized that you had written parrots, not PARENTS. I couldn't figure out why you would tell them they were once eggs...? /my cousin, the chicken MonkeyFilter: Projectile pooping. Enough said. good on you fellas that can keep parrot-type birds as they should be kept. They're charming in small doses, or even when babysitting for a week--after that, the thought of a high-maintenance bird that could possibly out-live me is daunting. I've only ever owned a cockateil, and that crabby little b*astard lived waaaaaay to long
• I used too long for Mr. Cranky to fly the coop.
• Our pet hen would eat ANY table scraps. She always hid her eggs, though, so we never found 'em 'til they were past being edible.
• "l want them all! l'll have the brown ones... and those great big white ones... and l'll have those over there. And l want some for frying and for scrambling... and for hard-boiled for snacks. Oh, God, and l'll have those over there."
• Last week I was adding a stair rail to our front deck, right near the bird room window. Every time I finished power screwing a deck screw, from inside the house I would hear "BBzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttt", followed by the squeaking sound that driving a screw into green wood can make. Thanks to the African Grey, the drilling noises continued long into the evening. You get used to it after a while.
• The Horror!
• My grandmother fed her chickens cracked corn and garbage. All the stalks, rinds, pot-ends, and plate-scrapings. Golly were those eggs delicious. And I decided then that chickens deserve to be eaten. They were stupid, smelly, and vicious. They could run around for ages with their heads cut off. They would peck one of their own number to death (thus "hen-pecked"), eat their own broken eggs, and peck me so hard when I went to gather eggs that they drew blood (I used to put an egg-carton over my hand when I went under the hens to get their eggs). Plus NOTHING stinks like chicken-poop.
• Chickens deserve to be eaten, but only in desperate situations will I ever butcher one again. Worse than cleaning six months of poop out of the coop in 102 degrees! phuh, phuh, phuh, phulttt! *picks feathers out of teeth
• Care to try some Chicken Tofu-ey?
• I'm no vegetarian, but I sometimes wonder how our diets might differ if there were no such thing as butchers and no sales of meat; if you wanted to buy meat you bought the whole, live animal and had to kill, clean and cut it yourself. I think peanut butter and jelly sandwich consumption would soar. hey! unintentional combi-threading!
• Cheese has its admirers.
• does cheese have even a single detractor??
• Stilton does.
• This thread is why MoFi was invented.
• Cockatoo eggs stuffed near a cock on a flight to Bangkok Sorry, I couldn't resist...
• GramMa! He said "stuffed!"
• Shhh! You're gonna get GramMa all riled up! Last time she used a bamboo cane on me (though I secretly enjoyed it). Nothing worse than a headless chicken flapping about in the air, splattering blood all over.
• 'ere! Wot's 'appened to Muffpub? MoFi not cool enough for him anymore??
• Gang-gang cockatoo: dunno about Asia, sugarmilktea, but its topknot drives birdfanciers in North America mad with desire! The galah or rose-breasted is fairly common here, though.