every day is a good day
I delivered some eggs at Slough Food in Edison today. One of the cartons has an egg laid today by Snowflake. All the eggs were laid yesterday and today. They are in the cooler at Slough Foods. If you’re in Edison this weekend, pick up some super fresh eggs. Each egg has the date it was laid, so you don’t have to guess how old they are.
If you’re wanting to make fluffy omelettes or a soufflé, use them right away. To make boiled eggs, let them sit in the fridge for a week.
It’s Thursday, the day to deliver fresh salad greens and eggs to Tweets Café. The time to pick greens like Ruby Streaks is early in the morning when it’s cool. It’s a great time to be out in the field, scissors in hand, carefully cutting tender greens. The only sounds are the roosters crowing and the birds singing in the trees.
And this is one of the eggs destined for Tweets Café today. Maybe noting which hens are laying which eggs and writing the date on them is unnecessary, but each egg is that special.
Six months or so from now, these little chicks will be producing fantastic eggs. Until then, they get to spend several months bathed in the care and love of their mother, followed by a carefree months becoming adults with their siblings. They will never know what it’s like to be caged or confined to a laying barn with thousands of other chickens.
Every day, they’ll wake up from their roost, hop down, stretch, take a drink, maybe peck a bit before stepping outdoors to spend the whole day looking for good things to eat over acres of pasture, brush, and woodland.
On the board today – a simple lunch starting with freshly picked spring chrysanthemums (春菊-shyungiku) and kale, sautéed in home made butter made from raw cream.
Followed by two eggs gathered within the past half hour, cracked into a bowl, laid on the sautéing greens, covered and allowed to gently firm to a soft egg.
Flavored with a bit of sea salt from San Juan Island Sea Salt, and served on a bed of brown rice.
Every day the hens lay eggs with such beauty, they are small works of art. When you buy them in a store, they are cold and lifeless. But when you gather them throughout the day, they are warm to the touch, almost hot if the hen has just laid them and left the nest. You can tell they are living things.
Today is Thursday, Egg Day here at a man and his hoe®. Time to pedal this week’s eggs down to Tweets Café in Edison. The subtle variety in the eggs the hens lay always impresses. You never get the idea from supermarket eggs that chicken eggs come in such a riot of shapes, sizes and colors. The relentless push to sort and standardize gives people the impression that chicken eggs are all the same, and that they only come in three sizes: small, medium, large. And that they only come in two colors: white or brown.
Reality is far more interesting than that. Not only is there a vast variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, each hen lays a slightly different egg every time. They are never identical. It almost makes you believe that they scheme about what kind of egg they want to lay the next day. The really radical hens have figured out how to squeeze two yolks inside a gigantic egg, or do they lay a double egg when they feel really lucky or are hopelessly in love?
