Wasted Eggs

Two weeks since my parents' have gone, so now the food they have left for me is starting to go bad.  I'm doing the best I can, and they did get rid of a lot of food, but they left some for me, and I couldn't get to it.

There is other food I have to consume, but the glaring obstacle I believed I would have immense difficulty in eating is the three cartons of eggs they left for me.  They thought that I could eat the eggs.  They also thought that I have made eggs before.  I haven't.  Never did, until they left, after which I scoured the Internet and taught myself how in the hell to make eggs.

So this began a trial-and-error on something that only in my advanced age I have appreciated: Learning the fundamental skill of cooking for yourself.  I cracked only two eggs, and once I cooked them I realized it wasn't enough.  I learned that you should mix the eggs with milk -- and it just so happens that my parents left me some fat-free milk for me to drink, and I just used that instead!  But I didn't measure it.  I guessed instead, and the result was dry eggs, not the fluffy, creamy eggs that I get when I order eggs at a restaurant.  The result, in fact, was like the dry, stiff scrambled eggs (and I always prefer them scrambled) that my Grandmother always made for me when I was young.  They weren't bad; that was the way I always had my eggs.  But there was a different, and possibly better, way, and that way included using more milk than I used the first time.  And I decided to adorn my eggs with salt and pepper and the shredded cheese my parents bought in bulk and the green onions I still need to use.  I liked that, and I was going to use that for the rest of the eggs.

I have done it three more times, still trying to learn the best of doing them.  Four eggs makes me more than full, but I can still eat it.  With the pepper and salt and onions (though not necessarily the cheese, which is Mexican taco cheese), my eggs have this spicy taste to it, and I kind of like that.  The problem I still faced was that once the egg curdled and it was ready to go, I had this liquid from the milk that just didn't burn off.  I remember having some liquid to drink along with the eggs when I order it when I'm outside, but that's still a pain, and I still worked pouring out just enough so that I would have that annoying water once the eggs were ready to eat.

Until today.  I get freaked out about the point at which these eggs I was determined to eat were going to go bad, but I didn't know how to tell until I cracked them open and the yolk looked weird.  That's when I went back to my trusted friend the Internet and I learned the old trick about bad eggs floating in water.

It had been a whole weekend since I had eggs because I was working the Vikings game all weekend.  To not run into a nasty surprise, I took at first a shallow bowl and then a deeper measuring cup to dunk the eggs.

All but three of them floated.  And I still had 17 eggs to go.

After my initial thought of, "Is it possible I already ate eggs that would have floated if I tested them?  If so, then I can eat these, right?  No?" I thought, "Well, shit."  Hey, I wasn't going to get through all of them.  But to toss 14 eggs is ... well, a waste is an understatement.  Ain't my fault -- my parents bought the eggs, not me.  But that still sucks.

And in the meantime I planned to eat some eggs for breakfast.  At least I had three, which I tested again and again to make absolutely sure they sank.  I also had the rest of the milk I thought I could use completely for these eggs, plus even more green onions that still needed to be used.  I tried to rally by making eggs for the fourth (and presumably final, for now) time, but it was kind of a disaster.  I used oil instead of butter this time, and the crackling from the oil scared me into spilling the egg/milk batter over the pan and onto the stove.  While getting napkins to clean that up I think I let the egg mixture sit in the pan a little too long, so some of the eggs got burned.  Or maybe the brown eggs is the result of spoiled eggs.  Anyway, I had to cook it a little longer for some reason, so I turned the stove up from low-medium to medium.  And then it still wasn't done because the milk wasn't boiling off.  Then I figured that it was boiling as quick as before, but there was so much milk with the number of eggs I had this morning compared to the previous two times when I had four eggs, that there was just too much liquid left over.  So today, my last day of making eggs, I didn't have eggs, I had egg soup.

On the bright side I finally got done with the milk -- which, by the way, was a week past its expiration date, but I was told in the same link I embedded above that sour milk can be used if you boil it as part of making eggs.  But now I have 14 eggs, in two different egg cartons, that I'm going to take to the trash at the gas station while I gas up my parents' minivan and get this free coffee because today apparently is National Coffee Day.

Oh, and I still have leftovers I need to get through.  I assume they're not spoiled yet.  But I can't dunk noodles or stew or baked potatoes to see if they're rotten yet.