Ostrich Omelettes

I was recently driving through Littlerock in the Antelope Valley and discovered Charlie Brown Farms, the holy grail for adventurous eaters. I was having the young men in our ward over for a meeting on our upcoming spring break camping trip and found the perfect sidelight for the meeting - an ostrich and an emu egg for scrambled eggs!

Several days later, as I thought about the number of boys and adults that might be at the house, I was concerned there would not be enough. So I had my paralegal search out ostrich eggs for sale and she discovered Doug Osborne's O.K. Corral near Victorville. I decided that some ostrich egg potato salad, prepared ahead, would add some filler and interest. So I sent my paralegal to Victorville for another ostrich egg and some ostrich sausage. Well, when they learned I was going to hardboil the ostrich egg, they sold my paralegal two cracked eggs for the price of one perfect egg. That turned out to be a mistake.

The ostrich egg white leaked out while boiling (it had to boil for an hour and a quarter!) and caused the pot to boil over leaving a foul smelling sticky mess.

The hardboiled egg, out of the shell, looked like craters of the moon. I was going to have the boys cut up the egg and mix it into the salad, but I figured if they saw it this way, they would never eat it. So I did the cutting. An ostrich egg is the equivalent of about 24 chicken eggs and it has a massive yolk.

I mixed together several potato salad recipes from Allrecipes.com which included potatoes, celery, chopped green onions, mayonnaise and sweet pickle relish and made a massive amount of potato salad.

Doug Osborne drilled a hole in one of the ostrich eggs. He provided a straw and gave instructions to poke the straw into the shell to break up the yolk, then insert the straw in the hole in the egg and blow the egg out into the pan. Sam Haws volunteered for duty on the ostrich egg.

It worked!

Before cooking the ostrich egg, I cooked the ostrich sausage so it would be ready to add to the egg.

The sausage was amazingly good and spicy (ostrich I'd tasted before was kind of bland).

The ostrich egg filled the large skillet and took quite a while to cook. With the added ostrich sausage, it made a nice ostrich omelette.

Next it was time to try emu. Kyle Wright volunteered to blow the emu egg out of the shell.

The emu egg is the equivalent of about 10 chicken eggs, quite a bit smaller than the ostrich egg. The shell is also quite a bit thinner.

With some added ostrich sausage, emu omelette was added to our fare for the evening.

To add a little variety, I also cooked up some venison and bison sausage purchased at Charlie Brown Farms.

I also grilled a venison steak and chopped it into pieces so the boys could get a small taste.

Everyone was pretty adventuresome and tried a little bit of each type of food. Some quite liked it. I really loved the potato salad.