Culture Shock?

It has come to my attention that I am irreversibly multi-culture...ed.

I offered to make dinner tonight for the people of my household, and I asked mom what she wanted, and she said "surprise me". So I walked around the kitchen, opened the fridge a few times (did you know that opening and closing it does not make more things appear in it? This is a shocking new revelation to me.), and finally remembered something that my dad used to make me for breakfast sometimes.

Soldiers.

No, not the buff, army kind. (In any case, army soldiers tend to not like being cooked and run away. Or fight back... since they're in the army, and all.)

The soft boiled egg and toast kind.

For any of you who don't know what soldiers are, it's basically a soft boiled egg (an egg with the yolk not solid, but still runny) and toast cut up into long strips. Then you dunk the toast sticks into the yolk, and there you have it. Insta-yummy.

So while I was boiling the eggs and toasting the toast, Duncan came home from lacrosse practice. And I said "I'm making soldiers!" and he said "Great!"

Mom came home about 40 minutes later, and I said, "I made soldiers!" and she smiled and graciously said, "Yum." And then as I sat her down at the kitchen table, she admitted that she'd never eaten soldiers before. So I, in shock, told her what to do.

This was when I started to catch on to the fact that Americans don't eat soldiers.

And then Kerry-Lynn came home and I said, "There are some soldiers for you!" and she said "Yay!" and sat right down with us to munch.

Basically, that's the end of the story.

But I, half breed that I am, have lived my 18 years thinking that soft boiled eggs were commonplace. Isn't it logical? You boil eggs for 4 minutes or so and get a soft boiled egg, and then a few minutes more if you decide you would like something a little bit different? It's what I, the result of both British and American cultures, have grown up with.

In any case, I'm going to go around school tomorrow and ask my friends if they've ever even heard of soft boiling an egg.