real farmers eat quiche

This is going to sound really funny, but I haven't eaten any eggs yet. I should qualify that: until today, I hadn't eaten any of our girls' eggs. Now at first, I let BCF jr eat the eggs since they were few and far between. And egg laying is a strange thing. Maybe it's just a natural, non-tampered, non-technical, un-drivethru thing. I was expecting the 5 months mark to arrive and bang - eggs galore. Firing on all six cylinders, if you will. Not so. It's more like, a bunch of women are due to have their baby on the same day but they come at all different times. There seems to be a lot of wiggle room. So one starts and then 4 days later another starts. And they don't lay an egg a day suddenly. It comes on gradually. In honesty this is all conjecture. I have little to back this up. It's not like we have a "laying cam" set up in the coop, although we have had discussions doing just that. Our evidence comes from the eggs themselves. The first eggs are very small and rather oblong. They are also discoloured. With each egg, they get larger and more egg shaped and coloured (brown in this case). When we get a weird small egg, we figure a new girl has graduated to hen-hood. Now it seems that 3 hens are laying and there are more eggs to be had. I have no excuses to not try the eggs. I let our chicken sitter eat the ones he found (future blogs on crazy Joe the chicken sitter). I brought 5 to my mom. Now, she had a fridge full of organic free range eggs from a local farmer. She lives in farm country and she's a baby boomer- I should have known better. I think a small part of me was feeling weird about eating my children's potential children so to speak. I know it makes no sense since we have no rooster (oh ya, and they are not my children, they are chickens), but the potential is there. Anyhow, I was getting tired of lying to people who enthusiastically said "fresh eggs must be so good." So today, when we had restocked our eggs I decided it was time. I got out my trusted Linda McCartney vegetarian cookbook and whipped up the finest "Quiche Linda" you ever did see. Potential never tasted so good.

the day we have all been waiting for...

I've been feeling mildly guilty all summer. There have been many moments with the chickens like, when 2 are perched up on the bird bath, and I say, man, I gotta blog about that - it's just so cute and strange all at once. Then I see a butterfly or get hungry for lunch and "poof" the thought is gone. Now that summer is fleeting and autumn is peeking around the corner, I'm feeling the need for routine and to tie up loose ends. There are a few blog ideas knocking around my noggin. However, I would be an irresponsible farmer and blogger if I did not blog about a very important happening...you guessed it, WE HAVE EGGS. This past Labour Day weekend (fitting) we got our first 3 eggs. The fourth came today. I will spare you with the count from here on in (I am keeping track to see how much money we actually save - so far we are still in the red minus 75 cents). Now here is the killer part; it was Mr.BCF who "called it" or predicted and confirmed that we had incoming eggs. This part really bugs me. I am with those fowl every day. I check on them many times a day, talk to them, give them bits of my lunch, hose their manure off the walkway. You get the picture - I am intimately acquainted with these hens. Moving on with our story...Friday morning, the girls were particularly noisy. I was having chicken remorse i.e. "I thought the roosters were the noisy ones, why did I get chickens, why?" Mr.BCF said matter-of-factly, I think the chickens are going to start laying today. He goes to the coop and sure enough, there it is - a perfect, brown egg. BCF jr was so thrilled that he ran around the neighbourhood to show all the important people: his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother, the guy who watches the chickens when we are away, the people on the corner who own the pizza joint - you know, the usual. When BCFjr got home he said he wanted the egg for lunch. He handed it to me, warm and wet from his little sweaty hand. Yum.