Freckles and Kevin Bacon: a comparative study

I know most of you have been crossing your fingers for a post on duck eggs. Well, my friends, today is...Saturday. And today we're going to talk about duck eggs.

These are duck eggs:

We recently got a dozen duck eggs from a guy that Raphael goes to school with or met in a parking lot or who merely heard someone mention Raphael's name once and became determined to make sure Raphael got some duck eggs from his personal ducks. (Raphael has that effect on people - the effect whereby he simply has to take a breath in the vicinity of another person and that person is instantly all like: "I need to give you duck eggs!".) Pheromones, maybe. Or some terrible, dark wizardry.

Whatever it is, I got duck eggs out of it. 

I decided to do a comparison between storebought chicken eggs and fresh homemade eggs laid by ducks with whom we practically have a relationship. You know about the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? But many of you probably aren't aware of the Three Degrees of Duck Eggs. I'm sure there's something like the Five Degrees of Buttered Toast, but don't take my word for it.

To begin my study, I laid the eggs side-by-side to compare their morphologies.

Side-by-side:

From left: Fresh duck egg laid by a friend and storebought
chicken egg laid by a stranger.

It was immediately obvious that the duck egg was bigger and weirder. 

Next I placed them together on a sparkly rainbow-colored table runner and gave them names.  

Party eggs:

From left:  Freckles and Kevin Bacon.

Thirdly, I heated up a frying pan and cracked them into a sizzling pool of butter. As they cooked, I observed them in a scientific fashion. 

The duck egg had a bigger, rounder yolk. It stuck up really high above the whites compared to the chicken egg. I observed those eggs so thoroughly and scientifically that I inadvertently overcooked the chicken egg. I think in the greater egg-consuming community, this is referred to as "over well" or "over hard". In my community, it's called "gross" and is closely related to the "scrambled" variety of egg which is only slightly less of an abomination. I never throw an egg out, however, and also this was for science so I persevered.

Perseverance:

Exhibit #1. Chicken egg on the left; duck egg on the right.

As you can see in the photograph above, the duck egg (on the right) was much whiter and prettier than the chicken egg after being cooked. It resembled Cinderella on the way to her wedding in a frothy white gown. It stopped looking like a girl sweeping soot out of the fireplace in a weird, brown dress and started looking like an airbrushed egg in a magazine. The chicken egg continued to look overcooked.

The final and perhaps most important part of my study was the taste test.

 Breakfast:

Exhibit #2. Where's the bacon?
This is too many degrees of separation for my taste.

Basically, the duck egg tasted like a fresher, much more delicious, perfectly runny-golden-yolked version of the gross, overcooked, stupid chicken egg. 

So in the end, I sabotaged my own scientific study by being too excited about it. Which means I'm probably going to have to perform the whole experiment over again tomorrow. But with bacon, obviously.


P.S. Happy Easter, ya'll!