Eggs are a regular part of most American's diets, but how much do we really know about them? See if you know these ten facts I've collected from around the internet.
01. Can’t remember if an egg is fresh or hard boiled? Just spin the egg. If it wobbles, it’s raw. If it spins easily, it’s hard boiled. A fresh egg will sink in water, a stale one will float.
02. The color of the egg shell is not related to quality, nutrients, flavour, or cooking characteristics. White shelled eggs are produced by hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Brown shelled eggs are produced by hens with red feathers and red ear lobes. Brown egg layers usually are slightly larger and require more food, thus brown eggs usually cost more than white eggs. Araucana chickens lay blue or pink eggs. An egg shell has as many as 17,000 pores over its surface.
03. Chicken are descendants of the red jungle fowl (gallus gallus spadiceus) that lives in Asia. The chicken is one of the first domestic animals, appearing in China around 1400 BC. The are some 150 chicken species and hundreds of chicken breeds.
This guy is a Red Jungle Fowl, in case you were wondering. I'm sure I can see the resemblance.
04. Of course birds are not the only ones laying eggs. Other egg layers include insects and arachnids, amphibians, and reptiles (which lay eggs with a leathery shell.) Only two species of mammals lay eggs: the Duck-Billed Platypus, and the Echidna (which looks like a little hedgehog.)
This chap is an Echidna, a form of anteater. They live about 45 years, can swim, can lift up to twice their body weight, and are only slightly less intelligent than a cat.
05. If you poke a small hole in the shell of an egg before boiling, the egg will expand inside the shell so that your cooked hard boiled egg does not have a flat bottom.
06. Dinosaur eggs are many shapes and sizes. Some are up to 16" long or more. But bigger eggs didn't always mean bigger dinosaurs. Some very large dinosaurs had small eggs. The first dinosaur egg fossils were found in France in 1869. Many dinosaur eggs found still have their original shells.
07. The largest egg from a current animal comes from the ostrich. It's equivalent to 2 dozen chicken eggs. Weighing in at over 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds), an ostrich egg is the largest single cell on the planet! As the egg matures, it develops into a young bird made up of many cells. Ostrich eggs are about the size of cantaloupes. Their shells are also very thick and strong — an adult human can stand o one without breaking it! An ostrich egg needs to be boiled for 2 hours to get a hard-boiled egg.
08. Egg yolks and whites both have valuable qualities on their own for your skin, so there are a couple different facial treatments to do with eggs. With egg whites, you can make a soothing anti-aging cleanser that smooths the skin. Whisk whites with a little bit of water, and wash over your face. After rinsing off, you should find puffiness diminished, and your pores looking smaller. Egg yolks are very rich in Vitamin A, which is great for moisturizing.
The yolks can also be used for this, instead of the whites. A raw egg rubbed into your hair. allowed to sit, and then shampooed out is a wonderful way to make your hair moisturized and shiny.
Have a pimple that you want to get rid of before a special event? Take a small piece of the skin that lines your egg's shell, and apply it over the pimple like a bandage. Let it dry overnight. As the skin dries, it sticks to your skin but draws up. This pulls the congestion in your pore to the surface, instead of waiting days to do it on its own.
09. A mother hen turns her egg approximately 50 times a day to prevent the yolk from sticking to the shell.
10. Despite their solid appearance, egg shells have thousands of tiny pores that allow moisture to leave the egg and oxygen to replace it. This meets the needs of the growing chick perfectly — the evaporating moisture makes more room for the growing chick while drawing in the additional oxygen it needs. In the 21 days it takes for a chicken egg to incubate, it will absorb about 8 pints of oxygen and release about 7 pints of carbon dioxide and about 18 pints of water vapor.
Bonus: According to the bible, the chicken came first. Genesis 1:20-22: "So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.”
For some information about the use of eggs around the world, for fortune telling and communication with the dead, check out this page: http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/menus/egg-facts.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment