Deviled Quail Eggs! (May 2021)

When I moved to California (May 2021), I went months without really cooking anything in my new kitchen. I had started working in a bakery (waking up at 2am 5 days a week!) and was dead tired all the time. I’m still dead tired all the time.

After about a month of living in my new place, I saw that the mini grocery store at the end of my street sold quail eggs. I had never had one, and they were so small and cute and curious to me. I was feeling inspired and so I picked up a dozen for a project I had thought about trying once along time ago: deviled quail eggs!

This was the first real cooking project I had in my new kitchen. Basic but brilliant.

NOTES:

• Boiling time was an experiment but I settled on 3-3.5 min. That is, bring your water to a boil and then add the eggs for this amount of time before transferring them into ice water to cool before peeling.

• Peeling the shells off was harder than with normal eggs but not terrible.

• I used a mini spoon to carefully scoop out and separate the yokes.

• I mixed the yokes with mustard, mayo, paprika, salt, pepper, and a small amount of Laura’s Cuisine pesto picante (a motherf*cking hot, flavorful, delicious sauce made on the Cape. Not terribly pesto-like at all actually). I put this mix in a piping bag and piped it back into the egg whites before garnishing with paprika and thinly sliced red pepper. That’s it! The taste honestly wasn’t noticeably different from regular deviled eggs to me, but these turned out SO CUTE. And they are bite size, and exciting because they are a new take on something people do all the time without much variation (or pizazz tbh). I also think the addition of a flavorful hot sauce makes these killer. In the future I want to try this again with farmers market quail eggs because I suspect those will have better flavors goin on.

I’m moving into a phase on this blog where I don’t think i’ll really try so hard to type up hard and fast recipes. After all, that is not how I cook anyway, and this space is first and for most for me. If anyone else ever actually reads this, I would encourage using my rough ingredient lists/ instructions more for inspiration and as a jumping off point to discover one’s own personal tastes.