Cluck! Cluck!

It seems that food is always on my mind....whether because I am starving, because I am cooking, or because of the tantalizing smells coming from the restaurant's many ovens or stoves. There is one ingredient however that runs through every vein of the restaurant and one that I personally use more than I would have ever dreamed possible.

Eggs are a food we all know about. In fact, most of us probably have some in our fridges right now. They are one of those three items that are always on the grocery list--milk, bread and yes eggs. I grew up with eggs in my home in abundance. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast, the occasional quiche and many cakes and cookies. The only sad fact is I hate eggs although it might be more accurate to say that eggs hate me. Throw them in something sweet and cover them with sugar and I am great, but make me an omelet or a quiche and there is just no way I will eat them. Eggs and I share a mutual understanding with one another. We agree to be nice to each other with out crossing the line, until recently.

Eggs are like potatoes. They can be used many ways themselves and with salt become enjoyable. We scramble, poach, fry, sunny side, over many ways and sometimes use them raw just to name a few ways. Eggs are versatile by themselves but where they begin to amaze me is just how many things eggs work their way into.

We use a lot of eggs at the restaurant. I knew this, it has always been apparent especially since I began making the breads and pasta. I use between 100-150 eggs a day...yes a day not a week but a day. That is just me. I can't account for the eggs that are used for our finishing and our dishes on the line. That's just me for breads and for pasta. It amazes me everyday I can use over 12 dozen eggs.

This weekend or really Saturday paints the perfect picture of eggs being used for anything and everything you can imagine. Get ready to count the ways.

For Easter we made Easter baskets for all the children who came to the restaurant that were 12 and under. The contained many goodies the first being colored eggs (1). I had the opportunity to color eggs and get paid. It was great, until I realized I had to color 100. The baskets all had sugar cookies (2) in them as well. They were butterfly and flower shaped. They were so fun to make and very fun to decorate.

In addition to my Easter fun, I did my typical prep as well. Our egg problem really became apparent to me on Saturday within an hour of being at work. I arrived to find our Sous Chef already working steadily on desserts. He had made Bread Pudding (3), was working on cheesecake (4) and had eggs out for one batch of our challah (5) bread.

Our produce man arrived shortly after me and rescued us from our empty egg shelf. He brought 15 dozen eggs with him to use in addition to the 7 or 8 dozen we already had already claimed among ourselves. Within 15-20 minutes every egg, new and old, was gone. I had claimed 200 for pasta (6) and yet more bread (7). Our line cooks had claimed many more dozen for scrambled eggs (8), omelets (9) and any other egg dish our customers wanted for brunch(10). One of our dinner cooks had also claimed at least a couple of dozen for our lunch and dinner sauteed mushrooms (11) and for finishing one of our pastas (12).

25 minutes later we were all paused in our work. Everything we started to make we soon realized we needed eggs. We sent someone out to get more and we all had a few minutes to rest while waiting for more eggs to make more bread pudding (13), more bread (14) and shortly we need more eggs on the line for our various other egg endeavors (15, 16, 17...and so on)

I think it's safe to say, eggs are vital to our operation, and while eggs and I will not be friends anytime soon, this weekend I bow to them and their many uses that make so many tasty and delicious foods.