New Recipe For Eggs and Bacon

Typical! Just as the eggs are becoming more scarce with the shorter days, I go and find a new recipe for cooking with them!

This is really simple to make and got a big thumbs up in our house last night.

You take a packet of bacon and part fry (or grill - or whatever) the rashers, dab them a little with kitchen roll then line a muffin tray with a rasher or so to make a 'well' which you simply crack an egg in to. I set the oven at around 190 and put them in for 10 minutes at first but decided the egg yolks were a little too runny for my liking and left them in for another few minutes. I prefer yolks to be 'cooked' and by default so do the rest of the family :D

I actually put a muffin case in first because the non-stick of the tray was starting to peel off. The case helped keep the mixture together when it was served up but Iain ended up eating some of the paper. Prat.

There is another variation of this where you whisk the egg before pouring it in giving a scrambled egg effect. I like this version though. It is so much less effort than frying, especially as I still can not fry a good egg. I can see this being a regular meal in our house from now on.

Here I Ammm . . .

No, I hadn't forgotten about y'all. Every day I have been composing wee stories in my head for you as I busy myself around the chickens, the run, and the garden but LIFE! kinda gets in the way of sitting down and passing them along to you.

David has started Big School which requires him getting up extremely early. That doesn't affect us much until the tiredness at the other end of the day catches up with him and he becomes the most horrible child ever while trying to finish off homework. I think I have done more homeworks with him in the past month than I ever did in my own High School career. Between getting home, doing homeworks, trying to get to bed at a decent time every night, and doing LIFE! etc - time flies and yea, ok, I forgot about you. Sorry.

In chicken news, we hardly see the girls now. I spend the usual 15-30 minutes with them in the mornings but now the darker nights are here, they have put themselves to bed by the time we get home. They sit blinking at me when I open the doors to count them before shutting the pop-hole and I have to admit, on more than one occasion I have thrown corn for them in the hope they will come out and play with me for a few minutes. I can't keep doing that as the nights get earlier but I do feel that we are losing touch with each other ever so slightly.Will they even remember who I am?

About 3 weeks ago they were up to 4 eggs a day. Then suddenly they went down to 1 egg with just Sydney laying. Then for the past week there have been NO eggs at all. I have 2 sitting in my Egg Skelter which I am almost afraid to use as they may be the LAST EVER! Am hoping it doesn't continue like this all through the winter - I was expecting 2 a day with the two hybrids producing, knowing the pure breeds would stop but NONE?! Hummpph.

The grass seed we put down is now good long grass but the *lawn* area is so wet we can't get it cut. It isn't very thick yet and would be easily scratched up. There is no way we could let the girls out on it yet - so they haven't had any free ranging for ages - I have had to give them extra grit to make up for it.

In apple news, I continue to make the most gorgeous apple crumbles from the windfalls. The small tree has more or less finished but there is still plenty of fruit on the larger tree. Sooner or later I am going to have to get on the ladders and pick these but I don't think they will store too well so there may be loads frozen or given away.Or we may have to eat nothing but apple for a week.

I am so pleased with the amount the trees have produced that I would seriously consider putting another tree in the garden. I have a nectarine tree which is massive but produces nothing. It could very quickly be removed to make way for another apple tree.

Oh oh oh - so far I have made two bottles of Apple Schnapps after following this recipe. It is incredibly easy to make but takes 3 months to finish so I don't know a. if I have done it right yet or b. if anyone will like it! I could make loads more but we don't have copious amounts of vodka lying around. Any more.

Looking back at the photos the other chap took, I think I may have crammed far too much apple in to mine!

What a Pickle

"So, how did your cooking go the other night?" I hear you all cry.

Wellllll. . . the cake took ages to make but was reallly well worth it - even when I noticed the baking powder sitting on the table UNUSED as I took the cake out of the oven. OOOPS. Sure, it didn't poison us.

Then, after the eggs were pickled I realised that WHOLE Mixed Spice isn't really the same thing as GROUND Mixed Spice and the resulting liquid was a tad - well - yuk looking. Still tasted the same though. You learn from your mistakes don't ya?

Oh - and another thing - it is best to read all the recipes before you follow just one. Seemingly it is harder to peel a cooked fresh egg and if you are pickling it is recommended you use older eggs - even from a couple of weeks ago. There is no way our eggs would stay around long enough for that malarkey!

I made another Apple Cake last night and realised why the baking powder had been left out of the first one. IT ISN'T IN THE RECIPE! It is listed in the ingredients but there are no specific instructions to put it in the bowl! How rude is that? It's a good job it wasn't something vitally important in the 6 steps to cake perfection. Dude, what if they had forgotten to tell me to put it in the oven! I could still be sitting there waiting for it to cook!

In egg-production news - David rang me at work to tell me there were four eggs waiting for us and one was HUGE. He weighed it for me and he was right, it is the biggest one we have had yet at 83g - the next largest is in the mid 70s. It looks humongous beside the wee 49g ones Lacey lays but we have no idea who laid it. It could be a double yolk-er from one of the normal girls or a new lay-er who is going to produce much bigger eggs. Am dying to see what is waiting for us over the next few days.

Eggciting huh?

Sell By Dates . . .

I have taken the head staggers and decided to bake this afternoon. We have apples and we have eggs. So I have decided to make an apple pie - or similar - and finally make some pickled eggs which has been on my to-do list since before we got the chooks.

I have all my baking ingredients in a plastic box in a cupboard. It is easy to keep them all in one place so flour doesn't spill all over the place. . .

So, I need flour and possibly cinnamon. I went to the box and brought out a couple of packets of spices, coconut, herbs etc. It seemed to all be in reverse chronological order. One lot of stuff was dated "Dec 2003", the next "April 2003", and the next "Sept 2002". EEEEK! Is it THAT long since I baked?

The worst was "Aug 2001". Needless to say it all went in the bin. I am not at all squeamish about sell by dates - after all - how does the product know what the month is - but I draw the line at it being FIVE YEARS out of date!

On the other hand - look at the Baking Powder please. The date on it is "Jun 03 2094". I am wondering what happens on June the 4th 2094 - does it suddenly combust?

Oh. Perhaps it means "June 2003". . . Aw well - it LOOKS ok. Ish.

The Farmstead Egg Cookbook

I went on a little rampage at Amazon the other night and ordered a couple of garden / chicken related books. One of them arrived today and I am delighted with it. It is The Farmstead Egg Cookbook by Terry Golson who has pulled together 70ish recipies that she has been using while cooking and baking with her own chickens' eggs over the past years.

It has lovely photos from around her own property and is simple enough to have instructions for (don't laugh) *boiling* and frying an egg. She doesn't call it *boiling* an egg though - it is hard-cooked instead. Having never previously been able to fry a perfect egg I am hoping her tips will help me! One thing I hadn't noticed yet though is that home-grown eggs have much thinker whites and don't spread out as much in a pan as battery hen eggs. Had anyone else noticed this? Am I the last to work it out?

One of the recipies is for a very simple Birdie in a Basket which I would never have thought of before but which Jessica had for her tea this evening. She screwed her face up as she watched me preparing it. I cut the crusts off two pieces of bread then cut a small round hole in both with a knife. They were put in to the pan and an egg cracked in to each hole and everything fried off until golden brown. the cut-outs were fried too and put on top as a hat.

She continued to screw her nose up as it was set in front of her but by the time I looked back again it was all gone. Success?

"It was all right, I suppose."

I am looking forward to creating my next egg-y meal from this cookbook :D