Not-so-fresh eggs still make for good eating

How long can eggs be kept, and how do I know if one's bad? I just put several in a pan to boil, and one kept bobbing up. I threw it out because I wasn't sure if it was good or not. And one morning I bought a carton of eggs, brought them straight home and put them in a pan to boil. Even though the carton was in the refrigerator case and felt cold, the eggs seemed warm. Should I have complained to the store?

Eggs can be kept refrigerated for at least three to five weeks and often longer. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tested eggs up to 10 weeks after they were laid and found them still safe and still making good cakes and meringues. But the Sell By date on the carton has to be five weeks or less after the date the egg was laid.

Once an egg is boiled, the storage time is only five to seven days. Your bobbing egg was probably old but probably safe. The older an egg is, the bigger the air bubble at the end will be. A fresh egg will have a very tiny bubble and not float at all. As the egg ages, it is more likely to float.

If you cracked it onto a plate, you would also notice that the old egg spread out more, and the yolk was flatter. That's just a result of aging, too. It's still safe.

If you cracked the egg and found the white was really white, not clear, or was sort of pearly-looking or any other color, those are signs of bacterial spoilage. Egg yolk color depends more on what the hen was eating, so it could be anything from pale yellow to dark yellow to almost green.

As for the warm eggs, you'll have to blame the chicken for that. A hen's body temperature and that of a freshly laid egg is about 104 degrees. Eggs must be stored at or below 45 degrees, but that won't chill them very fast. You probably got very fresh eggs. I'll bet they didn't peel very well after you boiled them!

Does rice have a lot of protein? I noticed on a bag of rice something about having 10 to 20 percent more protein, but the amount on the nutrition label was only 2 grams. That doesn't seem like much. How much would I need to eat to get all my protein from rice?

The short answer to your first question is no, and to the second: an awful lot. That said, here's a bit more explanation.

The amount of protein in rice depends on the variety grown, the type of rice it is (long grain, short grain, jasmine, etc.), and how it has been processed. Most rice has on average 7 to 9 percent protein. One package I looked at claimed 6 percent protein, 2 grams by the numbers on the label. An extra 10 percent of that won't make much difference.

But as important as quantity of protein is the quality. Protein is made up of amino acids and to survive and grow, we must have a certain balance of those. Rice protein doesn't have the right balance for humans, so we have to eat 1.5 to 2 times more total rice to get enough of the missing ones. Healthy adults need at least 46 grams (women) to 56 grams (men) of protein a day. Doing the calculations and figuring that we need 1.5 times as much to get our balance of amino acids, that comes out to 17.5 to 21 cups of cooked rice a day, if it were the only source of protein in a diet.

You would be pretty full, and sick of rice, before long at that rate!