So. Many. Eggs.

Guess what I did today? I spent nearly an hour sorting, stacking, cleaning, boiling, and organizing eggs. We have them everywhere. Dozens and dozens of eggs. To make it worse, we have run out of egg cartons, so my counters are filled with various baskets and containers which hold... you guessed it, eggs.

This is with my family eating a lot of eggs. K. has been known to have three eggs in the morning, possibly followed by an egg snack later in the day. D. has volunteered to make quiches for dinner one night, which I'm going to take him up on. It will get rid of a couple of dozen, if I can convince D. to make enough.

The other thing I did was research how to preserve eggs. Because as many eggs as we have now, come February, I'll be back to buying eggs in the store again. It's a little nuts. Here are my plans:

You can freeze raw eggs in ice cube containers and then use them for scrambled eggs or for baking. This is where the rabbit hole starts. I like to bake with the duck eggs. Duck eggs are a bit bigger than chicken eggs and the geese eggs are pretty enormous. Those eggs, when cracked, are not going to fit in my puny ice cube trays. So in order to freeze eggs, I had to order extra large ice cube trays. They're coming tomorrow, and I can start the freezing process.

You can make pickled eggs with hard boiled eggs which will keep in the refrigerator for months. I found recipes for different types of pickled eggs. Guess what I'm going to be doing this weekend? It's a good thing I have a lot of quart sized canning jars. Here's hoping my people like pickled eggs. But the eggs will be preserved! Maybe they will learn to like them.

You can... well, I found a lot of very old recipes from various homesteading sites. I'm not entirely sure about them. I would like to believe that rubbing mineral oil over the eggs will keep them from rotting, but am I willing to try it? I'm not sure. The other problem is that I don't think you can wash the eggs before you apply the mineral oil. Have I mentioned where ducks lay their eggs? Pretty much anywhere, but they seem drawn to mud. I have very muddy duck eggs. I'm not sure I'm terribly excited about the idea of smearing mineral oil all over very muddy (and who knows what else) covered eggs.

It's a shame that you cannot freeze whole hard-boiled eggs. My people eat dozens of hard-boiled eggs, but still cannot keep up with the output of the poultry. It would be lovely to boil them all and keep them for the winter, but alas, that will not work.

Selling some would be great. It turns out I am a terribly marketer. This is probably because I am perpetually sleep deprived (or at least feel that way) and because marketing my eggs on social media is item number 4893 on a to do list that will never be finished. Somehow reminding the wider world about eggs never quite reaches to the top of what is important. Instead I do things like call to make sure the septic tank gets cleaned out or pull rotting produce from the back of the refrigerator or teach various children how to do fractions and long division. It is often difficult to find time to stop doing these glamorous tasks in order to reduce the number of eggs in my house.

Hundreds of eggs, thousands of eggs, millions and billions and trillions of eggs.