Is This You? Tasty-Buds

There always are eggs in the refrigerator in old movies. When the couple comes home late and is hungry, one of the two will offer to make something. Open the fridge and poof eggs. Oh, and peppers, and onions, and some weird cheese. Never just cheddar. Who has that? I have eggs. I like eggs. Eggs have been given an up-and-down ride in my lifetime. Good for you. Bad, bad, bad for your cholesterol. Good again. Kind of like salt. It’s okay in the 50s, 1950s. Iodized salt was all the rage with the oncoming of the nuclear uprising. We must have iodine to combat the BOOM of the glow in the darkness that will surely come over the world.

Yes, hiding under our 5th-grade wooden desk, we will all be okay as long as we have iodized salt in our bloodstreams. Then? Blood pressure. “Oh, no, Mr. Bill!” We must not shake too freely. Then, well, some salt is okey-dokey. Then salt substitutes magically became the alternative salt. They, trust me here, salt substitutes are like school substitute teachers. You can get away with a lot when they are first introduced. But after a few days, you just want the original ole salty back in your system.  But! Yes, a salt-crusted ‘but.” Of course, that is not at all where I want to go today. Oh, it’s about eggs. And chickens.

I just finished a light dinner of scrambled eggs and a toasted bagel—delicious, I must say. Yes, I salted the eggs. But as I was stuffing a glob of the yellow in my pie hole, it dawned on me. 

Last night I had a frozen TV dinner of chicken. I cook, but I am also lazy, so I often scuttle the stove for the microwave. Hey, I remember when it took an hour and fifteen minutes to get a pot pie cooked in the oven. You really wanted a pot pie if you were willing to wait over an hour for the little 95% pastry and 5% brown piece of meat in a spoonful of what passed for gravy. Let’s move on…

What I found amazing was that I was actually eating eggs. Eggs that, if they had been left to the devices of the momma hens in a nest all warm and rolled around until they cheep-cheep to life, would have become chickens. Why? Why don’t eggs then, taste like chicken? Let that sink in. I’ll wait for the hatch.

Here is the beginning of a wonderful crispy thigh way before it’s time to become a thigh or drumstick. Cooked in heavy oil to a moist, tender juiciness. Just waiting to go into my tummy. So, good with hand-mashed potatoes and country, not brown gravy. Maybe some corn, too. And a little fudgy brownie for dessert. That was what was in my dinner last night. It was delicious. But so were the eggs. 

Where, when, and how does the egg flavor change from that fluffy or runny or hardboiled egg flavor to full-blown chicken flavor? Ah, another mystery of life. I have cats, and often, now this is going to get kinda gross. But stick with me.  My cats will catch birds outside. Well, of course, outside. That was silly. They catch birds because they are hunters and they are hungry, and birds, like chicken, I am sure, are tasty. Sometimes they hunt for the pure pleasure of the hunt and don’t always eat the whole bird. Then I come along and find little bird parts left over on the lawn or back porch. Here comes the ick…

After a few days, if I miss the mess to clean up, the bird that was a bird, a whole living bird, will smell like a rotten egg. I have not figured out how something like this happens. It’s an egg. It’s a scramble with salt. It’s a chicken dinner. Then, sometimes, that chicken that has become a bird that may be left on my back porch by a cat who was too full to finish dinner, eventually goes back to its roots and becomes a smelly rotten egg.

Makes me wonder what other food sources do that? Broccoli in the fridge too long gets pretty odoriferous. When it goes bad shouldn’t it smell like a broccoli bean? I have no idea if broccoli grows from a bean. How about milk? Old milk will never, never, I say, smell like the fresh cream when it comes out of the cow. Should it?

There you have it, my culinary captains of dining room tables everywhere. Something to bring up at your next meal of eggs at breakfast or chicken at dinner—with salt.

Trina lives in Diamond Valley. North of Eureka, Nevada. She loves to hear from readers. Email her at [email protected].

Really!