Blackberries and Pickled Quail Eggs

This Week’s Happenings at Gunter’s Gourmet Garden

Berries

Blackberries are wicked little berries that do not want to be found and harvested. When found, they will fight with the tenacity of a world heavyweight champ that has the benefit of a thousand switchblade knives trying to keep from being taken alive. I don’t know if this holds true with cultivated varieties as I have only been violated by the wild variety. As I write this, I am cut from top to bottom. I even have scratches on the bottom of my feet.

Sherry and I ventured into a thicket at the farm this week and had we not maintained constant verbal contact, which consisted mostly of “ouch” and “wow that hurts,” one of us surely would have been lost to the berry thicket monster. Little shop of horrors had nothing on these plants.

We did manage a respectful 8 pounds of berries before our assault was turned back. We will soon turn our hard-fought plunder into a sweet jam that will grace the tops of warm buttermilk biscuits with sweet cream butter.

Quail

The quail have certainly been a learning experience, most of it fun and some of it definitely not expected. Who knew that when the male Coturnix quail matures in a very rapid 6 weeks he becomes very amorous, even to his own ilk? It is disturbing. On the flip side, the female also matures at light speed and are already providing us with a steady supply of the dandiest little eggs you have ever seen.

Now there is another thing I wasn’t aware of… quail eggs have a very thin shell but have a thick membrane. This makes the old, whack-the-egg-on-the-side-of-the-skillet-and-empty-the-contents technique a practice best left to chicken eggs. The quail shell just shatters into a thousand small fragments that I find offensive in my sunny side up’s.

You have to adjust your strategy for opening quail eggs to include a small knife or a particular instrument built for just such a task that looks like a cross between a cigar cutter and a scissor.

I really enjoyed my first plate of fried quail eggs and toast just the other day. They taste, to my palate anyway, just like a chicken egg. I used a ratio of 3 quail eggs to one small chicken egg for my breaking of the fast (breakfast).

I also made pickled eggs using the quail eggs. To do this, you boil a bunch of eggs for a mere three minutes and cool quickly with cold water. Now the tricky part is next… remember the thin shell, thick membrane spoken of earler? Well here’s how you deal with that issue. You place the now cooled boiled eggs in a pan of vinegar covering the eggs to one inch above them. This next part is really cool, those eggs will start rolling and shaking and rocking like they are possessed and in no time the brown spots on the eggs will roll off like a decal for a model car. That’s cool yes, but in about 4 to 12 hours the shell will dissolve all together and leave that thick membrane rubbery and easy to get a hold of that makes pealing it off much easier, leaving you with a bite size hardboiled egg.

If you can refrain from popping all of these little quail fruits into your mouth, you can use your favorite chicken egg pickling recipe to make a jar of gourmet pickled quail eggs.

Well I need to go and dress my wounds now. I’m done talk’n, Matt.