The perfect food?

Eggs in a starring role

By Kim Carlson

March 21, 2008

Do you go through egg phases? I know I do. Sometimes I feel as if I couldn’t care less about eating another egg, especially when I sleep in and miss the Square Peg eggs at the Portland Farmers’ Market.

But then some mornings I wake up and, for whatever reason, eggs it must be.

Usually when that happens, I scramble two eggs with a small handful of grated jack cheese and eat them with salsa. Sometimes, though, if I have rustic bread on hand, I make croutons of bread cubes toasted in olive oil, place those in a bowl, and top them with a poached or four-minute egg. Tasty bliss.

A rainbow of freshly gathered goodness.

I might eat four or five eggs over the course of a week, and then invariably I return to eating egg-free for awhile. It’s peculiar, I know, but such are the vagaries of diet.

I’m happy that this week my egg phase coincides with all the new eggy content on Culinate.

We’ve got step-by-step instructions about how to make poached eggs and stuffed eggs. (Not familiar with stuffed eggs? We’ve got a feature on those devilish treats.)

In the Health+Food column, Catherine Bennett Dunster tells us not to avoid eggs — even if our cholesterol levels are high.

In the archives, Kelly Myers teaches us how to shop for the modern egg and gives us a simple frittata recipe at the same time.

And in an excerpt from her book The Good Egg, Marie Simmons teaches us a recipe for chicken soup with egg and pastina.

Finally, do you know how many chicken eggs it takes to equal one emu egg? To find out the answer to this question and discover lots of other eggy facts, head over to Gourmet, where there’s a gorgeous slide show about a dozen different kinds of, yup, eggs.