Some of the best things are discovered quite by accident...

Well, I have had a third request for the secret to making what have come to be known as "strange-boiled eggs." Since each request has come from someone who was asking because this is "absolutely the only way my child will eat an egg, period," I figure maybe we're onto something worth sharing.

We discovered these quite by accident one day.

I was cooking eggs to go with breakfast while my husband's family was visiting. My family had been reading the delightful story Red Sails to Capri as a family read-aloud, and the soft-boiled eggs which one of the main characters had consumed every morning of his life for many years had been intriguing to us, since we had never eaten one.

So, I was going for soft-boiled--strictly by the timer in the cookbook since I don't know Senora Pagano's soft-boiled egg song--and I called to my husband for a taste test to be sure it was done. I had pulled it out just at the right time, peeled it quickly and easily thanks to the baking soda, and handed it to him.

Perfect.

Yet the few seconds all this "call, peel, and taste" took was apparently enough to take my eggs from "soft-boiled" to something else no longer soft-boiled, but not quite hard-boiled, either.

I was disappointed--and more than a little embarrassed--to be serving these strange things to my house guests. But my children were thrilled. Only one of the four enjoys soft-boiled eggs, and none of them are too thrilled with the hard-boiled variety. My nephew is the one who dubbed them "strange-boiled," and he proceeded to eat the first egg he'd eaten in its entirety in his life.

I spent the next several weeks trying to get the formula right, in order to re-capture the correct consistency to the final product. My kids choked down a lot of soft-boiled eggs, and we consumed a ton of hard-boiled-eggs-turned-egg-salad, in the pursuit of this elusive formula.

I present it to you now, for your family's enjoyment. If you have a child who won't eat eggs, at least give these a whirl. He may surprise you.

"Strange-Boiled" Eggs recipe on the recipe blog, Sharing Recipes