On Getting Eggs

So as a FYI I wrote a lengthy post the other day, thinking “Oh boy, this is great, back from my honeymoon and writing a nice big ol’ blog post.”  When I was finished writing, as I customarily do, I clicked spell check and read through it again looking for any errors or typos (note: even though I do this with every post I ever write, I still have a tendency to miss little mistakes).  When I’d finished reading through it I just sat there and thought to myself “Jeez, that was horrible.”  It was pretty much just a rant about how people have been pissing me off all week, which really isn’t the kind of thing I need to share with the world (and in truth, upon further scrutiny, nobody was really even pissing me off that much).  So anyways, I scrapped that post, because I thought it would be nice to write something not all angsty and angry and annoyed (and other words starting with the letter A).

Unfortunately, the rest of the week has ended up being quite hectic and I have gotten a moment to write anything since that post.  But hooray and great joy!  Here I am now!

As I mentioned above I have just returned from my lengthy nine-day honeymoon, which was wondrous.  While I could easily write a lot about it, for now I will just say that Eliza and I had a really great time.

What I want to write about here is eggs . . . specifically the eggs that my lovely chickens have begun to lay.

Now obviously we knew when we got the chickens that eggs would occur at some point (eggs were a very big point in getting chickens at all). However, we didn’t really have a clearly defined idea of when these future eggs would occur.  With a little bit of research we had the general assumption that eggs might start arriving sometime in October (which ended up being true), but as the month approached we became a bit skeptical.  Chickens do not lay as well (or sometimes at all) in cold weather, and so there was a thought that maybe our birds would not start laying eggs until the following spring. 

How fortunate we are to have been proven wrong!

Over the past several weeks we have collected several eggs (I think we have over a dozen right now).  So far we only think that maybe two or three of our six birds are actually laying, but hopefully the rest a soon to follow.  These first eggs have tended to be smaller (which is normal for young chickens), but they are exciting.  One of the layers is one of our Rose Comb Brown Leghorns, which has been laying lovely white eggs.  Our other layer(s) are one or two of our Ameraucanas which have been giving us awesome light green eggs (we’re hoping that maybe the third Ameraucana will produce blue eggs).

Tonight I plan on cooking a quiche with our first good collection of eggs.  Not sure what all I will put into it (bought some feta and olives last night thinking that they might go well).  I am getting really excited to figure out all forts of things to make with eggs.  Besides quiches (which I super love and want to make tons of) I’d like to do frittatas, creme brulee, deviled eggs, custards, etc.  If any of y’all out there in the net-o-sphere have good egg recipes that you’d like to recommend or share I’d love to hear them (and maybe I’ll write a post about them upon trying to make them myself).

Anyways, it is awesome to be finally getting our eggs from our chickens.  Now if they will just stop destroying our garden they might actually start really earning their keep (I kid, we love these birds).

~ by Nathaniel on November 4, 2011.