Meal Memoir | Learning to love eggs

Dec 29, 2022

If there is such a thing as a food mantra, mine this past year would be: I don’t hate eggs, I can eat eggs, I might even like eggs.

I’ve long thought of myself as “not an egg person” because I tend to dwell on the forms of eggs that I absolutely do not enjoy: hard-boiled eggs and Chinese steamed eggs. Those were my parents’ preferred methods of serving eggs and my distaste for them growing up has significantly colored my impression of eggs overall

Since college though, I’ve had exposure to a lot more ways of eating eggs — scrambled, fried, omelette, poached, soft-boiled; at restaurant brunches, group trip breakfasts, late-night ramen sessions — and I happen to like all of those methods more than steamed and hard-boiled (I actually love hard-boiled yolk but not enough to also have to stomach the egg white).

Despite knowing that I can eat (and even enjoy) eggs if I just prepare it in a more personally palatable way, my attitude toward eggs didn’t start moving in a more positive direction until this year. And the main reason isn’t taste but function.

One of Jason’s goals this year was to eat more protein and a subsequent edict is to have protein in every lunch and dinner. We get that done a lot of the time by batch-cooking chicken thighs or hunks of beef but our go-to solution when nothing is prepped or thawed (besides just going with spaghetti because we always have frozen meatballs handy) is now “add a few eggs”.

I’m on board with the protein goal for nutrition purposes and have really come to appreciate the simplicity of “add a few eggs” as a “protein solution”. Little by little, it’s like some switch is being flipped in my mind where eggs are being reframed from Gross Food to Helpful Tool.

And in thinking of eggs as a nutritional tool, I’m now much more enthusiastic about bringing them into our everyday meals

So! This is our year in eggs.