Egg-Credible

The dog days of summer are really the dog days of sports too. No football or basketball means we are relegated to things like golf, tennis, and soccer. I’m not saying that I haven’t watched any of these over the past couple of weeks, but I doubt you’re going to find me caring enough to publish a blog post about any of them. Baseball I actually enjoy following from time to time, but the times I’ve actually sat through entire baseball game from start to finish on TV lately are probably few and far between. The lack of sports topics combined with how busy work has been lately all adds up to, for lack of a smarter sounding way to put it, not a lot of writing by me…but something happened last night that compelled me to open up a blank Microsoft Word document and start typing.

(Fair warning: for anyone who may randomly come across this blog when trolling through the barren wasteland of the Internet, don’t expect anything particularly profound to be revealed here in the next few paragraphs…there, I think that is a proper disclaimer.)

My wife Krissy is allergic to a good number of things. I feel bad because even though she may love to pet a cute and cuddly puppy or go on a cleaning rampage at her parents’ house it doesn’t change the fact that the dog hair or dust turns her into a sneezy, itchy, eye-watery person. All of that sucks, but to be completely selfish and narcissistic for a moment there is only one of these allergies that really affect me (I will be eating my words 5 years from now when I really want to bring home that black lab or German shepherd pup): eggs. It wasn’t until a few years ago that Krissy went to the allergist to see what in fact she was allergic to. There were a bunch of the usual suspects that we already expected like animal hair, dust, pollen, etc., but when eggs was cited as one of the things she was allergic to it pretty much rocked our worlds. You would have thought that one of us had just found out we had a terminal disease or something, but it was a dagger on a couple of levels. 1st, it just seemed like (especially to me, who isn’t really allergic to anything) a really random thing to be random to. 2nd, we had eggs all the time. Eggs were one of our favorite things to eat: scrambled eggs, poached eggs, hard-boiled eggs, egg salad. You name it, we ate it, and yet we never knew. After that, it started to make sense why Krissy would get headaches a lot of times in the mid-morning…coincidentally on a morning where we had eggs for breakfast earlier.

I think one of the very 1st times I slept over Krissy’s apartment when we 1st started dating she made her egg specialty, “bread eggs.” Bread eggs consist of buttered toast with a little hole cut out of the middle of the bread. The toast is put in the frying pan, and an egg is cracked in the middle of that hole. The white of the egg seeps through the bottom of the hole and cooks while congealing with the underside of the bread, and the yolk sits in the middle of the whole. The gooey goodness of the semi-cooked yolk is like the cherry on the top of the sundae. (That little bread hole is then perfect for sopping up the extra yolk that invariably spills out as you’re trying to eat the whole thing.) I’ve heard of other names for this concoction since like “a Cyclops,” but no one had ever quite made eggs like that before, so just like that I had a new favorite way to eat them.

Now, it might seem odd that Krissy’s egg allergy would have any kind of effect on me. After all, what’s to stop me from continuing to buy eggs and eat them on my own? Well, the problem was that I wasn’t the only one in the house that loved eating eggs, and despite the fact that she knew what they would do to her, anytime I made eggs for myself Krissy couldn’t help making some to eat for herself or trying a little taste of mine. (Her reaction to them was pretty sensitive for a while too. She would make brownies or something, which take an egg or 2 to make the batter, and even licking a smidge of the uncooked batter off of a spoon would make her feel not too hot.) Anyway, I figured it was just easier to not have them in the house at all, so we stopped buying them. On rare occasions, we would buy a half dozen so she could make brownies again or something, and I would devour them the 1st chance that I got when I was home alone…partially to eliminate the temptation for her and partially because I’m a pig. So when Krissy got re-tested by the allergist this past week she had hopes that the shots she had been getting would have cured most of her allergies. Some were much better. Some, like her reaction to animal hair, were as bad as ever. She even discovered she had allergies to a couple of things they forgot to test last time, like milk and corn. However, one of the things that showed slight improvement was her reaction to eggs. I’m honestly not sure who was happier out of the 2 of us. Naturally, we celebrated by having an egg feast over the last couple of days. Last night, I made sort of an omelet for myself for dinner, and Krissy hard-boiled some eggs for her to cut up and put into a salad. We made enough hard-boiled eggs so that I could make myself an egg salad sandwich for lunch at work today. Together we are basking in the glory of eggs again, and there’s no looking back now.