Last night Rebecca brought home ten quail eggs. She'd been visiting a friend with an acreage who keeps a variety of animals: pygmy goats, araucana hens (the kind Martha Stewart has that lay green and blue eggs), and quails, among others. He had a bowl of about 40 quail eggs (he keeps 12 quail) and offered some to Rebecca and her friend.
When she first showed them to me, and once I got over my disappointment that they weren't those chocolate eggs with the thin candy coating, I marveled at the mottling on them—the way each one was so different. Some had a shiny finish, some a matte shell.
Tonight she offered to make us an additional course for dinner and perused quail egg recipes on the web. Did you know it takes 24 quail eggs to make an omelet? Or that there is a site called
Quail-Egg-Recipes.com?
We decided against pickled quail eggs and deviled quail eggs and opted for an appetizer that involved toasting baguette slices and topping them with olive tapenade and a fried quail egg.
Rebecca took charge, and after a few difficulties toasting bread in the broiler, she turned out the cutest darned appetizers we'd ever seen. They were a ten on the adorableness scale.
Cracking the eggs was challenging—the membrane was tough and they were so tiny. But they fried up nicely. For the second batch she used a goat cheese and dill spread we'd gotten at Saturday's farmer's market instead of the tapenade and left the yokes a little softer. We voted these our favorites.
She reserved four quail eggs for tomorrow's breakfast—a mini-omelet, perhaps? With teeny toast? Bitty bacon?
