Eggstrodinary free food

The one thing I really love about this time of the year is ‘eggs’ especially duck eggs and goose eggs. I know some people say that duck eggs are too strong for them but if you’ve never tried a goose egg – yummmmeee.

To give you some idea of size that’s a cracked goose egg and a hen egg in it’s shell in this bowl and as you can see the goose egg yolk is bigger than the whole hen egg! Unlike a duck egg they do not have that strong flavour and are more like a hen egg, and I’m not on about those pale insipid things one buys from a supermarket but proper free range hen eggs that have lived on a wide variety of wild growth etc. with their bright yellow yolks. Some good friends of mine, from the days when I used to do a lot of match fishing, operate, manage and fish a local lake where there has been an ongoing problem over the years with Canada Geese, hundreds of them who all nest on the two small islands in the lake and each year swell their numbers by breeding about fifteen to twenty broods of goslings, usually about over a hundred, that is until the last couple of years since they have been ‘managing’ the geese as well, that is after a little tuition by yours truly. Canada geese are strange animals as if one is sitting a nest of six to eight eggs on average and you take them all leaving one in the nest, they will lay another clutch. So the method is this, the fishermen have a small fibreglass dinghy which they use for maintenance and an emergency boat, which they row over to the islands and take all but one egg off each of the nests and discard them as it is not known how long they have been laid. The egg that’s left is marked with a felt pen. They return a couple of days later and take all the newly laid eggs removing the one marked with the felt pen and discard it, then they mark another fresh egg with felt pen. The geese then conveniently lay again in time for another egg gathering. The resulting eggs are shared out between several of us. The season usually last a couple of months and as Dawn doesn’t like them I get them all! The only thing with them is, like duck eggs, you have to cook them well so I either have them whipped and as an omelette or as a fried egg cooked both sides and when I say a fried egg, they are usually about six/seven inches in diameter (on the plate that is not the egg) with a yolk about 2½ inches diameter!

Writing this has started me off so I’m thinking of a goose egg for supper, so till next time,

Don’t bang ‘em about.

Blossom