Almost a month ago, my flock of eleven hens began laying eggs. To date, the tally is over 70 small, "pullet" eggs, with a half dozen or so large eggs sprinkled in-- most of those double yolks. Since then, the challenge has been to find new ways to use our new-found bounty of protein. My son and I are the biggest fans of eggs in the family; my daughter swears she will eat them only in cake. Since he was about 10 though, Joe began cooking up his own eggs for breakfast, usually scrambled, fried or sunny-side-up, using a cute little pan I found at the grocery store. I am strictly a scrambled egg girl--no runny yolks or separate whites for me and don't even talk to me about deviled eggs after the childhood horror of people eating eggs that sat out in 90 degree heat at summer church picnics.
I've looked forward to lovely yellow yolks adding rich color to my baking. I've longed to make a quiche without worrying that I'd use up all my eggs before my next trip to the store. I never considered, however, what a challenge it would be to keep my stockpile of eggs down to under two dozen. Although our eggs are small--it takes about 4 of them to make the equivalent of 2 large eggs (about 1 cup cracked, useful information)--they are still piling up. The plan is to begin selling some of them to friends and neighbors to help offset the costs of my rather expensive hobby, but I figured I'd better wait until they were at least medium to large in grade (about 1.75 to 2 ounces each).
As a result, I've been looking for new ways to incorporate eggs into our daily meals. Early on, I made spoon bread using a favorite recipe from Colonial Williamsburg. This is a polenta-style cornbread made rich with the addition of four large eggs and served with generous amounts of butter. I've made several frittatas (think crustless quiche) in the last several weeks: ham and cheese, veggie, and still hoping to try the smoked salmon and cream cheese recipe I found. Oddly enough, Joe temporarily went on an egg-free diet, until I hounded him into having them for breakfast or lunch again. I've already added a book I found in Backyard Poultry to my amazon.com Christmas list: The Farmstead Egg Book.
My favorite dish so far has been flan, even though it was a bit of a failure. It has been a while since I made a caramel from scratch, and my first one turned into rock candy and the second into a pale, insipid syrup. A bit of hot water sloshed into the pie plate as I removed the custard from the hot water bath. Nevertheless, the flan was creamy, sweet and a beautiful shade of yellow. Who needs caramel? I must have eaten half of it by myself. Thinking perhaps crème brulée would be easier, I searched out some recipes and discovered they called for far more cream and yolks than I wanted to use (the whites always sit in the refrigerator and end up being tossed in the compost). On the other hand, the flan recipe using sweetened condensed milk and lowfat milk, which I decided to enrich with a bit of heavy cream, had just the right amount of richness I wanted without quite so much fat. Why not use the flan custard recipe in individual compote dishes, then broil the top à la crème brulée? After all, I have my own blow torch/flame weeder. And the best part of crème brulée is that crunchy, sugary topping that gives such great texture in combination with the smooth custard. So I have decided to try what may be a new dish: flan brulée!
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