Coddled Country Eggs for Breakfast

Thirty years ago when Tricia and I were married, we were given a gift of a night's stay in a Bed & Breakfast outside of Leesville, Louisiana.  It was very nice.  For breakfast we were treated to something called Coddled Eggs.  They were delicious!  It seems to be an English dish and coddlers were produced by a company called Royal Worcester since the late 1800's.  Well, when we got back from the B&B we went shopping in Houston and found a porcelain coddler.  However, it was a display model with no box and they weren't discounting it.  We didn't get it!  And we regretted it.  Tricia did find two on eBay and bought them - they were the Royal Worcester brand.  So we were in business.  We enjoy eating making coddled eggs from time to time.

Last week a friend put five egg coddlers on FB Marketplace at a good price and Tricia snagged them.  She told the boys to come for breakfast Sunday before church as she was making coddled eggs and homemade cinnamon rolls.  The egg coddlers hold one egg in each.  The coddler in the center with the peach on it was one we bought on eBay and comes as part of a set - one is a 1-egg coddler and the other holds two eggs.

You can experiment and 'fancy' them up.  Tricia added cheese to some, cilantro to others.  Some she scrambled and some she did not.

If you notice there is a stainless steel threaded ring around the top of the coddler.

There is a cap for each that screws on and each has a ring on the top so that you can lift out of the water.

The egg coddlers are placed in boiling water for about 7 - 8 minutes and then removed.  Coddled eggs are similar to a poached egg.  The white should be solid, with the yolk runny, but unbroken.

Except...  I am particular about eggs.  I don't like them runny!  Tricia does.  My coddled eggs, (I know some will think I ruined them!) were more molded eggs.  The one on the left was scrambled before putting into the coddler with cheese, cilantro and seasonings added.  The one on the right was not scrambled.

I cut into one so that you can see what mine looks like.  How about that homemade cinnamon roll, too!

A delicious little fancy breakfast.  Hard to beat.  The best part of waking up... is egg coddlers in your pot.

But Have You Read the Label on That?

Our youngest son, Benjamin is in the Electrical Engineering program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles.  Between Covid restrictions and the dormitory where he was living being extensively damaged by Hurricanes Laura and Delta, the college experience has been sub-par.  When Benjamin's dorm did not re-open, Benjamin and a friend moved into an apartment.  Tricia has been very concerned about his eating.

She does not want him subsisting on fast food.  "Have you read the label on that?" is a common refrain.  "Just look at all that sugar!"  "I can't even pronounce this word.  What in the world is in this?  Chemicals?"  Tricia decided this afternoon that Benjamin needed some homemade breakfasts rather that the "heart attack in a sack" you get from local drive-thrus.  Homemade Breakfast Burritos!  Portable.  Delicious.  Healthy.

With the hens' egg production on an upward trajectory, Tricia has all the ingredients at her disposal.  She cracked 18 eggs, seasoned them up and began scrambling them.

Of course you need tortillas to make breakfast burritos, but have you read the label on that?  Filled with all sorts of crazy stuff.  For her boy? - only the best.  Momma won't have him eating enriched white flour tortillas made in New York City.  She whipped together some tortilla dough and began rolling them out.

She heated up the griddle and began making delicious tortillas, flipping them to cook on both sides and pulling them off by hand when they start to brown.

When it comes to filling the burritos, Tricia isn't stingy.  The tortilla is filled with seasoned scrambled eggs.  On most other occasions, she'd add chorizo and cheese, but today they were just egg burritos.

The burritos are rolled tight and packed into a container for safekeeping and storage.  By Tricia's calculation, this will keep Benjamin stocked up with healthy breakfasts until this weekend so that he can re-load his container with fresh supplies.

A quote ascribed to both Napoleon and Frederick the Great says that "an army marches on its belly."  Well, Tricia made darn well sure that Benjamin starts each day with his belly full of healthy food.  Mommas look out after their boys, don't they?

Black Beans For Breakfast

Earlier this summer in THIS POST we talked about experimenting with growing and drying black beans.  We ended up with a large bowl of shiny, beautiful black beans.

So what to do with them?  Tricia recalls growing up in South Texas (Corpus Christi, to be exact) and fondly remembers a meal that her mom would make them for breakfast.  Tricia's mom made this meal with pinto beans, but we're going to make it with black beans, since we grew some in the garden this year.  Pinto beans, Tricia says, are more of a 'South Texas thing,' whereas black beans are more of a Mexico staple dish.  She wanted to prepare it for us.  First she soaked the black beans and cooked them on the stove.

Then, using a stick blender, she pureed the black beans and continued cooking them until a lot of the water evaporated.  They began to really thicken up.

While they were thickening, Tricia began to make homemade tortillas.  You can buy tortillas at the store, but I'm not gonna lie, I'm spoiled to the homemade ones.  It takes more work, but they are far superior to store-bought ones.

Once they're all rolled out you pop them in a heated skillet, flipping them once until they are golden brown.

So now to continue in a walk down memory lane with Tricia and her recollections of comfort food as a kid.  Taking a warm tortilla in your hand, spoon out some black beans onto the tortilla and spread evenly on one side.

Fold the other side over and then place in a skillet with oil and fry the 'black bean quesadilla,' flipping once in the oil until both sides are golden brown.

Now, you are ready to eat!  I added some sliced red and green jalapenos from the garden that I just picked and squeezed a lime over it.

Tricia was interested to see if it tasted like her childhood.  She said it did.  Black bean tacos for breakfast!  Muy bueno!

Foraged for Mushrooms Down By the Bayou Last Week

A friend of mine dropped by the house the other day and asked me what I was doing for the next hour.  I didn't have anything going on at the time, so I told him I was free.  He asked me to go foraging in the woods to try to find some Lion's Mane Mushrooms.  My friend is a member of a mushroom club where he goes out with mycologists on mushroom walks and they identify the different mushrooms that grow in our area.  At his last meeting, they found several lion's mane mushrooms.  They are good for eating as well as medicinal purposes.    We always pick oyster mushrooms and chanterelles, but I've never seen a lion's mane mushroom, so I decided to join him.  Here's what a lion's mane mushroom looks like:

Image Credit

My friend owns some property (about 11 acres) that butts up against Bayou Nezpique.  We've gone out there and found bags of chanterelles, but it is not time for chanterelles right now.  We drove out on a perfect afternoon.  The skies were blue.  The air crisp and clear.  We walked down to the water's edge, being careful not to trip on cypress knees that reached up from the ground.  Palmettos grew in clumps in the shade of the tupelos.  We heard whistling and saw a blur of movement as a bunch of wood ducks got up from the murky waters and flew through the trees at blinding speed.

We started walking upland, searching the forest floor and every dead tree we came across.  We saw plenty of deer tracks and areas where wild hogs had worked up the dirt looking for roots or acorns.  We saw so many things in the woods, but we didn't see any edible mushrooms.  I take that back, we did see a cluster of honey mushrooms, but they were past their prime and didn't look fresh anymore.

Disappointed, we walked back to the truck with empty paper bags.  We were hoping to fill them, but it appeared we were going home empty handed.  As we drove down the gravel road, there was an old willow stump on the side of the road and something white caught my eye.  My buddy stopped the truck and got out with his pocketknife and cut a nice stash of oyster mushrooms off the stump.

So we didn't go home empty-handed after all!  Once you find an area with mushrooms, it is a good idea to check it from time to time, especially a few days after a rain, as there will be more mushrooms to pick.  We refrigerated the oysters and the next morning, Tricia pulled them out of the paper bag and cleaned them up as they'll sometimes have dirt, little bugs and leaves or twigs on them.

Tricia cut up the oyster mushrooms and sauteed them in a cast iron skillet in butter with some peppers, onions, and garlic.

Once they were cooked, she cracked some fresh eggs that Benjamin had collected the night before.

Country eggs with sauteed fresh foraged wild mushrooms!

Now that's a breakfast of champions!  Maybe next time we'll find the lion's mane.

Can You Eat a Peacock Egg?

Of course not!  Peacocks don't lay eggs.  They are males.  If I correctly phrase the question to, "Can you eat the egg of a peahen?" well, then the answer is, "Of course you can!"  Penelope the Peahen lays between 4 - 8 eggs each year and because we don't have a peacock, they are not fertile.  In prior years she would set on them and it was a little futile watching her dutifully sit on her eggs when none were going to hatch.

Penelope the Peahen

This year we decided to go ahead and pick up her eggs.  They are noticeably larger than our chickens' eggs.

Here is a comparison that shows Penelope's egg on the left and one of our hens' eggs on the right.

In a week's time, Penelope laid four eggs and we picked each of them up.  She laid them in the grass, just out on the ground.  In prior years she laid her eggs on top of the flat roof of the goat barn.

Four peahen eggs

So, back to our original question, Can you eat them?  Yes, according to what I've read, they taste no different than chicken eggs, but we're going to find out this morning for breakfast.  I cracked her four eggs into a glass container to scramble them along with one chicken egg to show a comparison in size of the yolks.  You can see that a peahen's yolk in much larger.  I found in cracking her eggs, that the eggshell was harder than that of a chicken egg and the underlying membrane was harder to break. The yolk seemed to comprise a bigger percentage of the egg as opposed to a chicken egg.

Four peahen eggs and one chicken egg

Tricia sauteed some mushrooms, peppers and onions in a skillet.

And I scrambled the peahen eggs, adding some fresh ground pepper and kosher salt.

Scrambling up Penelope's eggs

When the vegetables were ready, we poured the peahen eggs in the skillet and cooked until done.

We were a little cautious at first in trying a new thing.  What would it taste like? Would it have a strong, wild taste?  We weren't sure, but we soon found out.  They were good!  We couldn't really distinguish a taste any different from our chicken's eggs.  We could get used to eating peahen eggs.  With the large size of them, it takes fewer of them to feed our family.  The only problem is that with Penelope only laying between 4-8 eggs a year, we'd best not count on Penelope to feed us.  We'll stick with chicken eggs.

Migas for Breakfast

The other day we blogged about making homemade corn tortillas out of hand ground corn.  One of the things I couldn't wait for Tricia to make me with that was migas, a traditional Tex-Mex breakfast dish, which is essentially scrambled eggs with all the fixin's along with pieces of fried corn tortilla added (similar to homemade fritos).  Good stuff - and easy, too!  Here's how we do it:

Start off with some fresh eggs.  The pullets have recently started laying a few eggs.  They are small, but we eat them up.

The Hens' egg production is gradually increasing (about 9 a day now on average).

Prep the veggies you want to add.  I used onion, potato, jalapeno, mushroom and tomato.

Chopped vegetables

Put some oil or butter in a skillet and cook your chopped potatoes.

Now take a corn tortilla or two and tear into bite sized pieces.

Put a little more oil in the skillet and fry the tortillas.  This makes the kitchen smell good.

Fritos!

Saute your chopped veggies in a little butter until they're cooked down a little.

Veggies are done.

Pour the scrambled eggs, potatoes, other vegetables, into the skillet with your fried corn tortilla pieces and cook to your desired level of doneness.

Almost ready

Then serve this up on your breakfast plate while it is still hot .  

Breakfast of Champions!

Splash some tabasco sauce or pico de gallo on top.  It'll get your motor running.