quail eggs & morels

It seems like Don's quail were just hatched in his classroom. And they are so grown up now. A week ago this one, above, was a little over 4 weeks old.

Saturday, when they were five weeks and three days old, one - or maybe two - laid their first eggs! All we know for sure is that there were two eggs in the brooder. None of the birds 'fessed up. Don is trying to figure out which are male and which female. (Sharon?) We can discern at least one rooster: he crows incessantly. Maybe you already read about this monumental event over at Don's blog (or in your newspaper).

It takes about four quail eggs to equal the size of one large chicken egg. They are fairly common on sushi menus (cute on top of the salmon eggs) and you'll see them on fancy menus in other restaurants too. I found a recipe for Quail Eggs with Toasted Sesame Salt we're going to try.



Saturday I threw the first morel mushrooms of the season (!) into a pan, and Don cut open the quail eggs with a knife (they're too fragile to crack on the side of a bowl) and slid them in too. Wow, did they ever bubble up!




You can see the top egg was double yoked. But even if it hadn't been, a quail egg yoke is higher in ratio to the white than in chicken eggs. But they're little, so we're not too worried about cholestrol. (I suppose if we ate their equivalent to chicken eggs, like 4-6 of them, we'd need to watch it. BUT, Don read that eggs from free range hens have 1/3 less cholestrol than grocery store eggs; maybe that is also true of quail eggs. The math is starting to hurt my head.)

We each had three morel mushrooms and one quail egg (let's see, it took five bites each - two for each egg) as an appetizer before eating a bowl of Don's venison chili. We drank a toast of 'three-buck-Chuck' to our egg-layin' quail and our finger-nail sized morels and gobbled them up. The eggs were refined, the mushrooms fresh and tasty, having been soaked in salt water, then milk, then dredged in flour, before salting and peppering them and sauteeing in butter and oil (oil helps keep the butter from burning).

And below, in the fridge, is the lone egg from Sunday, waiting for more mates in the carton Don's quail eggs came in before they hatched.

Don broke this latest quail egg open this evening (after we moved the chickens into the chicken coop) and wasted it because it looked deformed, and he didn't think we should eat it. It was a double yoked model. Don said first eggs that are laid can be strange.

We didn't know the insides were blue.