Eggs. Eggs. Eggs

 

When I was younger – much, much younger – I thought  all eggs were clear whites and pale yellow yolks. When I got to New Zealand I was thrown by all these bright, bright yellow scrambled eggs. Little did I know that eggs were supposed to look that way.

I present to you one of the 7 or so eggs we get each day from our totally chilled chickens. They scratch happily around the paddocks after their morning feed of horrendously expensive seeds, have a morning tea break of our breakfast scraps (without egg bits; might have been a relative), an afternoon tea of more scraps and then a night feed of more seeds.

This keeps them near home, docile (no pecking or scratching at me) and producing wonderful eggs. And therein lies the problem. They keep on laying; day after day after day. I don’t much like eggs and won’t eat more than 2 a week, add about 4 for baking and I only consume about a day’s worth of production. What do we do with the other 6 days at an average 7 eggs a day? We try to feed them to the kids.

This hasn’t worked out too well. They are up to their eyeballs in eggs and have staged a mass revolt. What do you do when a 1 year old, a 3 year old, and a 5 year old revolt? Not too much. Remember, these ages are not known for their rational interchanges. Pretty much they stick to the basics.

“NO!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I want something else.”

“NO!”

Yael and Dan try to eat their share and more but we are still left with several dozen a week. We can’t sell them; legal constraints. We can’t eat them. None of us can stomach even the thought of yet another egg salad lunch. So we give them away.  Now these are great eggs from great chickens. Organic feed, no supplements, no hormones, no additives. Just great  eggs. And they are free! So why have our friends started edging away as we come up with yet another carton of eggs? I don’t know. If I can ever catch up with them, I’ll ask them.