About those eggs

Interesting Things about Eggs

Please read the whole article, but I will highlight two of their main points below:

2. Take the "sell-by" date with a grain of salt. In short, a carton may be up to two months old by the end of the sell-by date. Even so, according to the USDA, eggs are still fit for consumption for an additional three to five weeks past the sell-by date. We tasted two- and three-month-old eggs and found them perfectly palatable. At four months, the white was very loose and the yolk "tasted faintly of the refrigerator," though it was still edible. Our advice is to use your discretion. If the eggs smell odd or display discoloration, pitch them. Older eggs also lack the structure-lending properties of fresh eggs, so beware when baking. 

5. Farm-fresh eggs are well worth the splurge. In our taste tests, farm-fresh eggs were standouts. The large yolks were shockingly orange and their flavor was exceptionally rich and complex. The organic eggs followed in second place, with eggs from hens raised on a vegetarian diet in third, and the standard supermarket eggs last. Our conclusion? If you have access to eggs fresh from the farm, do buy them -- they are a special treat that would be best used in an egg-based dish like an omelet or frittata rather than baked into cakes or cookies. Otherwise, organic eggs are worth the premium -- about a dollar more than standard supermarket eggs. For general use, though, there's nothing wrong with supermarket eggs. 

As the chickens continue to wind down their production (I had 9 eggs in the refrigerator this morning) for the Winter I dread the thought of having to buy replacements from the store! 

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About that first egg....

Turns out the Commander isn't a very good finder.  We found 25 green eggs in the loft today so I'm am pretty sure that the lone Americauna has been laying for a while.

I wonder if the eggs are still good?

Hunting Season

Our Americauna hen laid her first egg yesterday...as far as we know.  The Commander found it up in the sheep hay loft while he was moving bales.  An extensive search failed to produce any other green eggs so that is how we deduced that this was her first egg.

That morning when the Commander opened the buck's side door he discovered Mamma chicken waiting to get inside.  It seems that Mamma chicken has started laying again and she has chosen the buck barn as her nesting area.

I have recently found roosters hiding in the nest boxes at lunch time, I can think of no sensible reason for why they would be doing that.  It seems that when they get in the boxes they roll any eggs out into the center aisle, great.

So today checking for eggs consisted of; pulling out a ladder and searching the sheep hay loft (1), running two stinky bucks out of their barn and searching through the waste hay (1), rummaging through the aisle hay in the coop (1), and chasing roosters out of the nest boxes (0).  Not a bad haul for a cold winter day, looks like hunting season has begun.

Ruffles have ridges...Do eggs?

Click on the picture above and take a close look at the egg.  It is full of ridges and wrinkles.  Do older chickens lay older looking eggs?  Ha!

Seriously, that is one odd looking egg.

Happy Easter

Don't let anyone tell you that you can't color brown eggs. Happy Easter!

Still no lambs. I think they have decided to all lamb at the same time. Lara and Gardenia are huge, Azalea has dropped and Ava looks suspicious. I have put everyone into their own stalls (kind of). Lara and Zoe get to room by themselves because I don't want them to trample any little ones. Kia and her baby Avalon room together in the last stall, I figure that with only Ava pregnant that there should be enough room. Gardenia and Azalea share the walkway, it is the biggest open area so there is plenty of room.

I still have hopes for Easter lambs but the girls have some work to do tonight.

Lonesome Egg

The school didn't want to try and hatch the poor blue egg that wouldn't fit into the incubator so I was left with a tough decision, should I throw it away or jury-rig a home made incubator? The home made incubator won.

I grabbed a lamp and a thermometer and positioned them on a table in the little guest bedroom so I could establish a temperature of just under 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I next took a small wash cloth and bowl and set it up as a nest. The blue egg was placed in the nest and it was joined by a brown egg that was laid that day to keep it company. I regulate the temperature by either opening the door or raising the nest by flipping the bowl over or adding a book underneath the bowl. I wrote numbers all over the eggs to keep track of rotating them, and a splash of water is added every so ofter to try and keep the nest a bit moist.

I have no idea if the two eggs in the "Macgyver" nest will hatch, but I figured I would give the little blue "too small for the incubator" egg a chance at life.

That's Production!

I have seven hens and I collected seven eggs today - woo whoo! This is the first time I have gotten 100% production since last Summer.

Making Candy

My daughter got a candy making kit for Christmas and has had a lot of fun with it! I told her she could make a few batches so long as she didn't make a pig of herself.

She loved the whole process of stirring the mixtures and laughed throughout the entire cooking process. I had an odd feeling that she was making funny faces at me while my back was turned.

This one tasted best after it had been refrigerated, especially the pink candy center.

I was surprised how good the homemade candy tasted, it was quickly eaten up. I missed my chance at this delicious morsel by a whisker, I was too slow to the fridge!

The kids hogged most of the candy but the entire creation and cooking process was very enjoyable, a real mother daughter project.

On a side note I purchased a carton of Large eggs during the Christmas cooking season as the hens production had slowed down to a trickle. I had two Large store eggs left over this weekend and decided to use them for breakfast...can you tell which two are home grown and the two that came from the store?

When I was cooking with the store eggs I felt that they were so much smaller than what I was used to that for every recipe that called for two eggs I used three. If these eggs are classified as Large I would hate to see anything smaller!

1003 Eggs!?!??

The egg count for the year passed the 1000 mark today, I just can't believe it. Somehow this family has found a way to either eat or cook or sell (a few dozen) over 1000 eggs (not counting Guinea eggs), and it isn't even July yet.

I tried to figure out how many eggs we could have possible eaten last year but gave up, my egg use has changed so dramatically that I can't even remember what it was like to not have a few dozen just laying around.

Since I am taking a statistics course this summer OFG noted that I should throw in a few mathematical facts concerning eggs, so here goes. A rough count of the number of days up to July 1st is 180, so 180 goes into 1000 approximately 5.5 times. I have 8 hens who as a group are laying on average 5.5 eggs per day, or 125 eggs per hen so far this year! Each hen is laying .694 eggs per day...whew.

Here is the part that just has me mystified, if I subtract the eggs currently in the fridge and the ones I sold we still average eating/cooking over 4 eggs per day! How is that possible?

Have you ever thought about how many eggs you use per year? Did you realize what a difference raising chickens has had on your diet? One thing is for certain, keeping these chickens has been fun AND profitable.

Easter Eggs

I broke down and bought some white eggs from the grocery store before Easter so that I had something for my daughter to color. I was told that the brown eggs don't color very well so at the time it seemed to be a good idea.

I put one of the colored white eggs in the Commanders lunch, not really thinking much of it. When he got home today he told me to only give him our fresh hard boiled eggs, "The white eggs taste like rubber." I noticed the yokes on the store eggs were yellow while our home eggs were almost orange, odd.

Turns out the the few brown eggs my daughter colored ended up being her favorites, lesson learned for next year. I don't think I can ever willingly go back to store bought eggs. Can you taste the difference?

Odds and Ends

Every day when we feed the rams Killarney gets very excited. He has tried to push his head through the fence, climb the fence, and prances over to the door. If he wasn't so potentially dangerous I would think he is just charming.

I had fifty bales of hay delivered and they were initially stored in the garage. I hope this will hold us over until the plants around here begin to grow and I can let the animals out to graze on their own.

The Commander moved them through the snowy slush and mud to the lofts in the goat and sheep barns. He left 10 bales in the garage to be used for the rams. The rams new building won't be built until probably May, we have to wait for the snow melt and the ground to thaw until beginning construction.

One of the hens is laying very long and tall eggs, you can see it in the middle. Lucy, our Rhode Island Red lays the darker brown egg on the far right while an average Gold Laced Wyandotte egg is on the left.

We find one long egg every day along with Lucy's, at least the long egg layer is consistent.

A short video of Alexander, looks like he is getting his legs under him.

Winter

I was looking at some posts over at Critter Farm and saw a picture of Pete and Reggie on their spools. My goats can't get to their spools because the spools are buried in snow.

The scenery is pretty but also a little bit sad and lonely. Come Spring the spools will be alive with little goats jumping and playing on them. I can't wait.

I want to thank everyone for leaving their hard boiled egg recipes on yesterdays post. The chickens gave us 8 eggs today so I am looking forward to trying them out!

How to Peel Hard Boil Eggs?

We have a lot of eggs, a LOT of eggs. The last few weekends we have been hard boiling about a dozen so they could be made into egg salad or just eaten straight from the refrigerator. We have been having one problem with this, they are very hard to peel.

These eggs are fresh, less than 1 week old. After boiling the eggs we plunge them into a bowl of cold water and then move them to the refrigerator. When peeling time comes the shell sticks to the egg and a time consuming battle begins.

Does anyone know any tricks to make peeling fresh eggs easier?