I always ate at least one egg a day growing up. My parents were firm believers that eggs somehow would help make my brain develop better and, thus, make me smarter. So they made having eggs in my daily diet a key parental responsibility. Most of the time, the egg was incorporated into breakfast so that the super nutrition would seep into me as the day went by, and I would be able to go to sleep a smarter girl than I had been waking up. Fortunately for me, they did not have one favorite way to serve eggs. I had hardboiled soy tea eggs with perfect marbling, pan-fried eggs with crispy golden edges , fermented duck eggs with orange yolks over congee, and eggs dropped into some soup and took on the form of threads. I liked them all. So you can probably understand my disappointment in the eggs that the cafeteria at school in the US had to offer. With no real alternatives, I accepted the dry and cold hard boiled kind, as well as the soggy and lukewarm scrambled kind, when I did eat eggs on school days. Most days, I skipped them all together.

It turns out, my body may have been accounting for those days I skipped. And at some point, when I didn’t return to the old routine after college, it entered a constant state of longing for eggs. Thus, I began my real life egg treasure hunt. But I never had a basket to keep what I found. Some have since been lost. So 2017 brings the year I start to collect, here.

Do I eat at least one egg a day now? You ask. Yes I do. What is it? You ask. Well, that will be the tale for another time.