Eggs-elent!

I have an impacted wisdom tooth trying to come through, so I've been trying to find soft things to eat that don't require a lot of chewing or that I open my mouth very wide. Tonight, I cooked the last of a dozen fresh eggs from my sister's chickens, and thought back to when I first started eating egg yolks. For my whole life, up until about a year and a half ago, I was egg whites only (except in scrambled and omelettes, and then it was just one yolk per 3 eggs). I didn't like the taste of them, and was afraid of the amount of cholesterol in them. Then John brought me to a little restaurant in Augusta called Rebecca's Place where I had eggs Benedict for the first time, where I willingly ate egg yolk for the first time. And I liked it.

Mmmm...

Fast forward a little to my extended unemployment. You've read about it and my struggles with food stamps and trying to survive (and if you haven't, go ahead and read back). As money dwindled I tried to eat as healthy as possible, which meant finding cheap sources of protein. Occasionally I would score a marked-down steak or package of chicken that I could make stretch for a couple of meals, but overall, meat was expensive. My sister has chickens and often has eggs to spare (and she has fun blue and green eggs!) so I usually have some in the fridge. After having eaten the fresh eggs from my sister's chickens (who eat vegetable scraps, bugs, and grass, and have a nice area to run around), I realized why I didn't like yolk: factory farm raised chicken eggs just don't taste good. You know how we describe things as smelling like "egg farts"? That's what store-bought eggs taste like to me.

Fresh, free-range eggs taste like wonderful sunshine. And I have to have that wonderful sunshine cooked a specific way: sunny side up (very runny) and fried in butter with Johnny's Seasoning Salt sprinkled on them, with some sort of bread vehicle for the yolk (but I've found hash browns or fried potatoes work amazingly well too). I still love eggs Benedict, though. There's a certain sensuality to fresh, creamy egg yolk coating your lips, and it's so much better for you than factory farmed eggs.

For those of you that don't like egg yolk, I challenge you to find fresh, local eggs. You'll find that they taste so much better than anything you can buy in the store.