Enormous eggs

So, I left you with this image last week:

Which, just in case you were wondering, is not a regular-sized egg in a novelty mini-pan. No, that is an ostrich egg.

See, most of our accommodation in South Africa was self-catering. And two of us quite like to cook—not coincidentally, the same two who did most of the supermarket runs. One of which came at the end of a five-hour drive en route to an ostrich farm in the country, when we had 30 minutes to buy 3 days’ worth of food for six people. We were a little bit punchy, and everything was in Afrikaans. Suffice to say, it didn’t take much discussion when my friend BC spotted a box full of ostrich eggs sitting under the regular chicken’s eggs and nudged me meaningfully. How often do you get an opportunity like that?



We were slightly taken aback afterwards when BC’s husband (DC) pointed out to us that one ostrich egg is the equivalent of 24 chicken’s eggs, foodwise. Because you can’t really tell that by comparing them, can you?

Undaunted by buyers’ remorse, we pressed on. Our first plan was to make an ostrich omelet, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to fold it, and eventually settled on an ostrich frittata instead. We hacked open the egg (accomplished by whacking it with a large bread knife several times):

and mixed it with copious amounts of prosciutto, cheese, peppers, and onions.

It took quite a long time to cook (we hear hard-boiling an ostrich egg takes 90 minutes—at least it didn’t take that long!), and we had to switch pans halfway through when we realized that it needed more time in the oven than the non-oven-safe first pan could handle. So the end result looked like this:

It was pretty tasty though. DP and DC were both extremely skeptical beforehand, but we all found it to be similar enough to a chicken’s egg omelet that we decided it could be snuck past the unsuspecting without telling and no one would notice. The only thing I noticed was that the lingering odor in the kitchen after cooking was slightly gamier than a chicken’s egg omelet would be. But really, what does that matter when you can get out of the kitchen and eat lunch here:

before going off to visit with more exotic critters?