From Charlotte

I am not a proponent of  farm fresh eggs and let me tell you why.  As a teenager, we had free range chickens.  We gathered eggs daily from all over the yard.  So I know a little about farm fresh eggs.

This is a true story as correctly as I can remember it.  It was early spring and our family was in the middle of calving season.  I was the first one up as my little sister was a newborn.  Out of the kindness of my heart, I decided to cook breakfast.  Everything was going fine.  The sausage was happily sizzling and the toast was merrily toasting and I set the table.  It was time to fry the eggs.  I had the skillet ready, the eggs on the counter, and I cracked my first egg.

KABOOM!!

The egg – rotten – exploded all over the kitchen.  Luckily, I have a very poor sense of smell, but my brother yelled from the living room, “Yew, gross!  What is that smell?”  As he came into the kitchen and saw the mess, he laughed and the chores outside suddenly had to be done right then.  The parents yelled from the back bedroom, “What happened?”  I carefully explained and received a “that happens sometimes.”

I cleaned up the mess by myself.  By the time I was done the sausage was mostly burned and the toast was properly cold.  I was undaunted.  I was going to cook breakfast.  I scooped up another egg.  I am not exaggerating to make a better story – I wish I was, but the very next egg I cracked, well it was rather hard to open, but I got it open.  It had a full grown chic, just days (or hours) from hatching.  I had no choice but to get rid of it, there was no saving that poor chick.  I was defeated (it doesn’t take much to defeat a teenager).  I declared that I hated eggs, only to receive resounding laughter from the back bedroom.

I managed to get two eggs in the pan before I cracked an egg with a large red spot, and then I got the rest of the eggs fried without any more mishaps.  The scar to my psyche still remains and I steer clear of “farm fresh eggs”.

–Charlotte