What’s up with the price of eggs lately? Well, besides the actual price of eggs, which is way up over what it was this past summer. It wasn’t too long ago that the stores regularly had eggs sale priced at 2 dozen for a dollar – sometime 3 dozen for a dollar. How times have changed. Recently, I saw a loss-leader sale on eggs – 4 dozen for five dollars. That’s what drew my attention to the price of eggs, and led to this conversation with myself – “eggs are on sale this week – hey, wait a minute, that’s $1.25 a dozen. That’s a SALE??”

We’ve been using a lot fewer eggs lately.

A week or two ago, there actually was a relatively good sale on eggs at one of the grocery chains around here. 69¢ a dozen. Of course, they put a limit on it. You could only buy one dozen per trip. Now, right before this, I swore if I found a decent price on eggs, I was stocking up and freezing some. (Freezing eggs is a relatively new concept for me.) Okay, here was my opportunity. Fortunately, I work less than a mile from one of these stores, and it’s a nice little walk at lunch to visit and cherry pick the sales – I do it regularly.

Surprisingly, the weather cooperated. Well, at least it wasn’t subzero. It is, after all, January. But there were no blizzards, freezing rain, or Arctic blasts to deter me. I spent four lunch hours that week egg shopping.

And the deal was even better than I thought. The previous weekend, there had been coupons for Special K Protein water – one bottle free. I had four of those – one from my paper, one from my mom’s paper, and two that friends had given me. My first shopping trip, I picked up my dozen eggs and bottle of water. The cashier rang them up, then said “42¢”. This gave me pause, since I knew the eggs were 69¢, so I asked her how that could be. Turns out, the water was discounted when I used my shoppers club card – but the coupon deducted the regular price. Sweet! As I said, I made three more trips that week for water and eggs. Now the price of eggs really was comparable to some of the best sale prices of this past summer.

I kept two dozen to use fresh, and froze two dozen. I had made my first attempt to freeze eggs this past summer. I’d break two into a bowl, beat ‘em up, dump them into a Ziploc bag, and toss into the freezer. It seemed a bit messy, but it worked. That is, it worked until my two year old refrigerator died while we were out of town for a week, during a heat wave, of course. (Something you never, EVER want to come home from vacation to is that smell. Trust me on this one.) We lost a lot of food, including my previously frozen – but now rotten – eggs. I decided to build a better mousetrap – er, find a better way to freeze eggs. This time, instead of dumping the two eggs right into a Ziploc, I poured them into a little Tupperware dish and popped that into the freezer. When they were frozen solid, I popped them out and put it in a Ziploc. Now I was able to fit a whole dozen eggs into one quart-sized bag. Woo-hoo, even greater savings! They look like yellow hockey pucks, but believe me, they’re far less messy this way. Six gold hockey pucks went into each bag.

Eggs are back to their new/old price this week – meaning over a dollar a dozen – and some places, WELL over. But my house is well stocked with very cheap eggs. We’re eating the 42¢ eggs and ignoring the $1.25+ eggs in the stores. Oh, yeah, I do love a good deal! And I love stocking up on those good deals!