Kid Meal: The Incredible, Edible Soft-Boiled Egg

When Matt was a little boy living in Germany, a common breakfast for him was a soft-boiled egg, served with butter and toast. He has such happy memories of those breakfasts that when we saw egg cups while browsing in a kitchen store we actually BOUGHT them--brand-new and everything!

Hey, big spenders, I know, but a combination of the novelty of a brand-new something-or-other and the fact that my kiddos are adventurous eaters (even more so than either Matt or me, I freely admit) made them absolutely giddy to try soft-boiled eggs for themselves.

And they're a hit! I use this soft-boiled egg technique, which is really different from the way that Matt remembers his eggs being cooked when he was a child, but the result is the same, from getting to crack open the egg at one end--

--to dipping in your spoon and scooping up the whites and the hot, runny yolks--

--to yum!!!

The girls have been eating these as part of breakfast or lunch about three times a week for a while now--I'm a little skeezed about not thoroughly cooking the eggs, so I've been trying to buy local just for this. I have a friend who sells her surplus eggs, and there's a local dude who sells duck eggs, but later this afternoon I'm going to check out a little long-term dream of mine by attending a class entitled "Chickens in the City." Depending on just one particular regulation that I need to have clarified at the class (Is a "visual barrier" between the coop and the adjacent neighbors' properties simply a barrier that one can see, or is it a barrier that completely conceals the coop?), we *may* have some little chick babies of our own next month, when the thirty or so eggs that my friend's hen sneaked off and laid and sat on hatch.

Otherwise, I'm thinking of trying to get my friend to at least let us foster some babies, even if we have to eventually give them back for lack of a "visual barrier," whatever that turns out to be.