Why did she soak eggshells? If these were just the shells, I wouldn't think there would be much of a smell. I don't soak eggshells in water but I rinse and dry a few of them for use in my worm bin because I raise them over the winter for release into my compost piles in the spring. Inside, they use broken up eggshells for digestion of food. Outside, they make use of fine grains of sand or whatever. So I keep a small plastic bag of ground eggshells but there is no smell to them at all.
@Ken Anderson I presumed she made fertilizer out of them, but was too young to question very much. But the smell was overwhelming! Frank
Some people grind the eggshells and feed them back to the chickens rather than purchasing calcium supplements for them. I would think it might add minerals to the soil if used that way. She might have been soaking them to use the water for plants or something.
So I made a batch of pasta today using my recipe that consists of flour and egg yolks...no other liquid. The recipe is about 2 1/2cups of flour and 15 egg yolks. It calls out the ingredients by weight (360 grams of flour and 300 grams of egg yolks.) I have a couple dozen regular sized fresh eggs and a couple dozen extra jumbo fresh eggs. When I saw that each yolk from the regular size egg weighed 20 grams, I figured I'd switch to the larger eggs so as to use fewer of them. Much to my surprise, the yolks of the bigger eggs also weighed 20 grams...all the extra volume was the white. I cracked a second extra large egg open to make sure it wasn't just that one egg, and the second yolk also weighed 20 grams, swimming around a ton of white. Granted this is a small data set and purely unscientific, but one would think that between of the 2 huge eggs I would have had at least one yolk that was proportionally larger. I thought it was interesting.
Tonight I ordered a "ttukbaegi", a small covered pottery bowl used in Korean cooking. I found several videos for making steamed eggs (that look pretty much like savory custard) using the bowls and I'm anxious to try it.
That's pretty cool. I've never seen those. I guess thee are a million different ways to eat the many different types of eggs.
I wish you had a better internet connection so you could watch the youtube videos. So many great looking things to make. I recently stocked up on Asian spices/sauces (fish sauce, oyster sauce, miren, etc.) and I'm having fun with it. I made some kick-ass beef and broccoli a couple of days ago; just amazing and so simple. A channel called "Aaron and Claire" is very entertaining and he makes the best looking Korean foods. (Hence my purchase of the ttukbaegi. I also bought a new wok; my LeCreuset cast iron wok is getting unwieldy; it weighs a literal ton. )
I can watch that stuff, I just risk running out of guaranteed high speed early in the month. I went through a heavy Asian phase. I still have the condiments you list in my cupboard, plus a can of Szechuan Preserved Vegetable (gnarly stuff.) You should try making your own Chinese mustard if you've not already...it is sooo good. So are homemade egg rolls. I did a thing for one New Years (I think it's called a Hot Pot) that's like a fondue. It's homemade chicken broth kept just below simmering in an electric wok, and you cut up an assortment of veggies and meats (beef, chicken, shrimp, pork) for folks to cook in the hot broth. When everyone's finished, you put noodles in small bowls, pour over the broth that everyone had a hand in flavoring (and that can never be repeated), and toast in the New Year. As an interesting aside, that Hot Pot is sort of how the Chinese eat, having soup at the last course because it's what's left after the meal has been made. Conversely, I've always thought that westerners serve soup as the first course as a sign of affluence.
I stopped by my friend's greenhouse to drop off some of my Amazon/Walmart shipping boxes (he uses them in his business so I don't put them in recycling) and his daughter is home from college. He keeps critters at his shop, to include her button quails (the smallest species of quail.) She hooked me up with these: That's obviously a regular chicken egg in the middle for reference. She & her dad claim that they taste just like hen's eggs...they just cook faster. I'm not sure what to do with them. I feel as though I gotta do something Chinese. I found a recipe to make a "salt oven" by heating salt & spices in a wok, then burying the eggs in the hot salt and letting them "bake" over a low heat. As an aside: she had just rescued one of the quails, who was egg-bound. She soaked it in warm water to relax it (epsom salts were recommended but she had none), then over a period of time she would gently squeeze the bird to push the egg down the canal. There's a 50/50 chance of this working (it did.) Without doing this, there's a 100% chance of the bird dying. Gotta give You Tube credit for having a video on how to do this.
My friend who owns his own greenhouse does all sorts of stuff on the side to make money. He's got button quail he's hatched and sold, ducks he's done the same thing with, and now he's bred his Icelandic chickens. He's not going to bother hatching them...the fertilized eggs go for upwards of $40 each. May as well take the money and run. He has other chickens at the store, so isolated the breeding pair in order to prevent her from consorting with the commoners.
Hopefully this wasn’t mentioned yet (I didn’t read the whole thread) but I read somewhere years ago that for its size, an egg has more nutrition in it than any other food.
One of Hitchcock's stranger phobias was revealed...... "Later on, many uncovered one of his stranger phobias: eggs. When he was working on the film The Birds, he allegedly asked a reporter, “Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?” Hm…"
My most recent cartons of eggs have had issues with fragile yolks. I cannot make an over-easy fried egg, nor can I separate the yolks from the whites. The yolks in the last 2 cartons of eggs completely lacked any membrane al all...the yolks are there but they are as orange amoebae spreading around the whites in an undifferentiated shape. The guy I buy them from has been getting the eggs from a number of locals, but for some reason he's down to just one consistent source. I've actually bought a carton of factory eggs from Aldi just so I could have an over-easy egg, but they lack flavor. Backyardchickens.com says that this problem can be caused by too much stress (unrelenting aggressive roosters, constant attack by predators, etc) or by insufficient protein in their diets (remedied by the addition of black oil sunflower seeds.) One would think that such eggs would either never get fertilized or would not develop into chicks. I need another source. The farm across the street charges $5+ a dozen...that's not gonna happen (or maybe it will.) There are "Fresh Egg" signs in front of a few houses around here, but the humans don't respond when you pull in the driveway, and I don't want to roust someone from their nap. Once I make contact with someone, I can figure out how they like to work this. I'll figure out something. I still got a couple of dozen in the fridge to go through.
We always have too many eggs so we tried freezing them. They tasted ok but a little rubbery, not much but you can tell. We also bury them in our garden to feed the soil. Some people can their eggs, we haven't tried that.