Miquailangelo Eggs

I've been meaning to try making marbled eggs for a while now, and having found a good deal on quail eggs at my local wet market, I asked my friend if she wanted to attempt the experiment together. She was charmed by photos on this recipe site; they look, as she put it, "like they were chiselled out of marble by Michelangelo."

"You mean Miquailangelo," I said.

So now we call them Miquailangelo eggs.

We boiled the eggs, gently cracked them with a teaspoon, then steeped them in black tea for two hours to get the marbled pattern.

 

Here is one such egg, in a salad with roasted sweet potatoes, cherry tomatoes and feta cheese.

Quail eggs – at least the ones I bought – require extreme delicacy in peeling, because the marbling is imprinted on the membrane, not on the albumen itself. And it's hard to peel the shell without damaging the membrane.

My friend could do it, but I couldn't – especially not when hangry. Don't peel eggs in hanger, she said.

I expanded on it (too hangry to peel eggs, but not too hangry to write parodies):

Slip inside

A finger in the shell—

No need to do it well,

Just crack the damn thing wide.