The first Egg Month Giveaway comes from my own kitchen collection of copper bowls and whisks.

Since the Chez Panisse kitchen is lined in copper from floor to ceiling, it was all but inevitable that I'd become obsessed with the rose-tinted metal myself. I've been collecting vintage bowls, pots, measuring cups, and anything else I can get my hands on, for the past 15 years. To the winner of this prize, I will send the copper bowl and whisk pictured above.

What does copper have to do with eggs? Well, as Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking:

Long before anyone knew about egg proteins or chemical bonds, cooks had come up with a way of controlling them. The French tradition has long specified the use of copper utensils for making egg foams. One early trace of this tradition is a 1771 illustration in the French Encyclopédie that shows a boy in a pastry kitchen working with a straw whisk and what the accompanying key identifies as "a copper bowl for beating egg whites."....Sure enough, if you whip egg whites in a copper bowl...the foam stays glossy and never develops grains.

So, besides being extraordinarily beautiful, copper bowls also produce glossier, more gorgeous meringues and whipped egg whites.

To top things off, the folks at Chronicle Books will send the winner four egg- and egg white-related cookbooks, all featuring that signature gorgeous Chronicle design.

To be eligible to win this prize, simply post a photo, recipe, link, or anything else egg-related to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and use the #EggMonth hashtag. I'll announce the winner next Monday when I reveal next week's giveaway.

Good Luck!