No, this is not a recipe; unfortunately, it’s what happens when you know you shouldn’t put a freshly-laid egg in your pocket (temporarily, because you forgot to bring the egg basket with you) and the egg meets its demise in the confines of your coat pocket.
It all began with six eggs the girls had laid in their nest boxes. I put them carefully in my pocket, even though I’d had an egg incident last year under similar circumstances. I knew I’d just be going right from the coop to the house, where the egg basket waited. I walked carefully back to the house and started transferring the eggs from the pocket to the egg basket. No eggs were fumbled, none hit the floor. Once finished, I hung my coat back up – it’s a heavy insulated duck cloth coat with a pair of leather work gloves in the pocket, so it bounced off the wall when I hung it on the peg.
Later, during the evening chores, I put my hand in my right pocket and was surprised to feel that it was sticky (no one ever wants to find something wet and sticky in their pocket). Digging down, I found something gooey and when I pulled my hand out, saw eggshell and yolk. I knew what had happened. I’d managed to carry the egg back to the house in one piece but had somehow left it in my pocket and when I hung my coat up, the egg bounced off the wall and became a splattered mess in my pocket.
Look, I’m going to be honest here: I know it’s unwise to walk around with an egg in your pocket, but sometimes the egg basket just isn’t handy and it’s easy to slip that egg in your coat. And that coat might have a very deep pocket where an egg can be overlooked. Nonetheless, I state for the record that this practice is a recipe for a mess (and the waste of a delicious pastured egg) – and I’m going to count my eggs more carefully before I hang up my coat again.