My quail are getting up to speed in the egg laying, with the 5 hens giving me 4-5 eggs a day for the last week. This adds up quickly when we are usually eating the chicken eggs (now that I’ve found the secret egg-laying lair). Since quail eggs are much smaller than a chicken egg, they just don’t fit well into a regular egg carton. Luckily, when I ordered hatching eggs a few years ago, I received the eggs in a 30-egg carton made for chukar and quail eggs.

Yesterday, my 30-egg carton reached its capacity. It was time to find something to do with these eggs, since there will be more tomorrow!

Options are the same as when dealing with chicken eggs, only on a smaller scale. Used to your advantage, this lends itself to things like mini-deviled eggs, a micro version of Scotch eggs, or my favorite, One-Bite Pickled Eggs.

I don’t bother to mix up my pickling liquid, as we ALWAYS have a mostly empty jar of something pickled in the refrigerator. My preference is pickled jalapeno juice, and sometimes I’ll keep a jar of just the juice for moments like this. However, today, I ended up using the juice from my tomolive recipe, as we have already emptied several jars of the tomolives.

One-Bite Pickled Eggs (OBPE)

• 

  Hard boil as many quail eggs as you want to pickle. In my case, it was 30.

• Remove the shells, rinsing to be sure to get all the shell bits. Nothing ruins a pickled egg like a crunchy bit of shell.
• Stuff the eggs into the jar of pickle juice.
• Place jar (with lid) back into the fridge
• Wait a week or more. (A week is about perfect, according to my wife. She says any longer and they get “too rubbery”. However, she doesn’t eat them very often, so what does she know? The longer they sit, the more developed the flavor gets, if you ask me. And since you are reading MY blog, and not hers, let’s stick with that, k? Though in reality, they rarely last long enough to matter either way.)
  
• Enjoy!

I have been known to slice them and put them on crackers in my pre-Paleo days, or sliced and put over a salad works as well. Ultimately, eaten straight from the jar with a fork (yes double-dipping) has always been my method of choice. (For those that worry, if I’m making OBPEs for anyone other than myself, I use proper food handling methods, and no double-dipping.)

And with two or three jars in rotation, along with quail in steady egg production, I get to have One-Bite Pickled Eggs all summer!

db