Got eggs?

Last week, I read an article that an egg-production facility in Cokato, Minnesota, went up in flames. The facility produces upwards of six million eggs a day. Tragically, tens of thousands of hens died.

This fire is yet another nail in the coffin of egg availability. Bird flu panic has caused millions upon millions of chickens to be culled, creating shortages and price increases like crazy.

Additionally, the state of Georgia has halted all poultry-related activities due to bird flu concerns. This means all "in-state poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales are suspended until further notice," with a corresponding massive ripple effect over multiple industries.

Now the prognosis is that egg prices will stay elevated forever. Seems a little pessimistic, but there you go.

The shortages (and elevated prices) have hit locally as well. A couple weeks ago while in our local grocery store, I saw this:

The less expensive eggs were cleaned out, while the pricier ones remained.

We seldom buy eggs, since we keep them on hand mostly for baking. But for those who depend on eggs for an inexpensive source of protein, these prices and shortages must be hitting hard.

We're hoping to get a coop built and start a flock of chickens this summer. In the meantime, when we need eggs, I'm grateful we can buy them from the nice older couple down the road who usually charges $3.50 a dozen.

For the love of eggs...

With the current shortage and price spike of eggs, the memes have started. Here are a few:

(Is it just me, or does this look like a rooster to you?)

Or, as one headline put it, "Americans may need to reprioritize what is attractive in a good partner: Does he or she have chickens?"

We have neighbors with chickens. They sell eggs periodically. They had a sign by their driveway last summer that eggs were available for $3/dozen. The sign came down after a couple weeks. Last week the sign was back, this time advertising eggs for $4/dozen. The sign came down after a couple of days. I have a feeling they're being besieged with demand, especially at those prices, and their hens can't keep up.

Q&A: Laundry, eggs, meals

Here are a few recent questions posed by readers:

“Can you tell us a little bit more about your system for hanging clothes, please? I can’t really tell how it’s done on those larger clothing items. Looks like a great idea though.”

Once upon a time, I had a regular clothesline.


Clearly it was great for summer use, but not so great for winter use, so during inclement and cold weather I just used our (propane) dryer.

Then two things happened.

One, we ran short of propane in January 2008, during a time when there was too much snow on our rugged dirt road for the propane delivery guy to fill our tanks. We had to severely curtail any and all propane use, including the dryer. So I went to a local hardware store to see about a standing clothes drying rack. The sales clerk showed me the only one they had left in stock, sitting on a shelf, for the rather exorbitant price of $45. “But it’s broken,” I said to the clerk, pointing to a fractured dowel.

“Then I’ll drop the price to $30,” he said.

“But it’s also broken here.” I pointed to another fractured dowel.

“$15 then.”

“Deal!”

I took the rack home, mended the dowels with wood glue, set it up in front of the wood stove, and hung a load of laundry. It only held one load, but it dried the clothes beautifully. I remember looking at it and telling Don, “I’ll never use the dryer again.” And I haven’t.

I used that single indoor clothes rack exhaustively throughout all winter weather thereafter. The only annoying thing is it really didn’t hold sheets well – it was far too small. So when it came time to wash sheets, I only washed one set at a time and draped them over the handrail of our stairs to dry.

Then the second thing happened: My outdoor clothesline broke from overuse in October 2010 (dropping four loads of wet laundry to the ground).

So Don built me a clothes rack suspended from the ceiling of our upstairs, which has a pitched roof.

Originally the rack was on pulleys suspended by paracord, the idea being I would raise or lower the rack as needed. As it turned out, I literally never moved the rack at all – it was at a fine level for hanging clothes – and the only disadvantage is it blocked the doors to a tiny second-floor deck.

A couple years ago, Don removed the rack, split it in half length-wise, and rehung it in another part of the upstairs under the sloped ceiling (on permanent supports, not pulleys), so now we have full access to the little outside deck.

This clothes rack absolutely revolutionized our household laundry. It easily holds four loads of laundry. I hang shirts on hangers along the edges.

Sheets are no trouble at all – I remember once when we were all recovering from the flu, I had everyone strip their beds and I washed all the sheets and hung them without a problem.

I have two standing racks I use for socks and dish towels.

Interestingly, Older Daughter requested a standing rack as a birthday present last December. Growing up with line-dried clothes, at first she thought a clothes dryer was kinda neat (she’s a live-in nanny with a professional family in New Jersey), but now she understands dryers are expensive to operate and batter the clothes around. She uses her collapsible clothes rack when needed and folds it away in her closet when it’s not in use.

And so the legacy continues.

---

Next question:

“What do you do with your extra eggs? Do you barter, or feed them to Darcy or what?”

All of the above. We barter them, we sell them, and a few go to Mr. Darcy. A few years ago, we bartered eggs for Younger Daughter's music lessons. We have several neighbors who buy eggs, and I have a lady in Coeur d’Alene who will take eight or ten dozen eggs whenever I’m in town (every few weeks). Yesterday I had fourteen dozen eggs in the fridge (!!) but thankfully my buyer in Coeur d'Alene took the whole batch. Obviously the chickens don’t lay this heavily year-round.

---

Last question:

“Also, now that you are empty nesters, how much time do you spend making meals and what are some of your typical meals? You have mentioned Don loves sandwiches so do you go simple with just the two of you?”

Yes, Don is a sandwich guy, so I make sure we always have fresh bread in the house (I use a bread machine and make about three loaves a week).

Since the kids are gone, we don’t jointly cook much, so we just forage whatever is in the fridge. We have a freezer full of beef, so sometimes Don cooks a roast, slices it, and that becomes lunch meat. Of course we’ll eat any leftovers when we host the neighborhood potluck.

Right now the garden is just getting planted so we don’t have much by way of fresh food (unless we buy it), but we have a pantry full of food I canned up, so we’ll often raid that. In short, we just eat when we’re hungry and have whatever is on hand.

Chickens: The latest urban status symbol

I must admit, I love chickens. They're dumb, they're noisy, they're messy -- but I just love 'em. On warm evenings, it's a fairly common thing for me to take a glass of wine and a book and sit outside "communing with chickens," as I call it. Half the time I'm not reading my book; I'm watching the birds preen, peck, scratch, doze, or just sit, with a foolish and satisfied smile on my face.

Which is why I found it amusing to see this article from a few weeks ago entitled "The Silicon Valley elite’s latest status symbol: Chickens." The subheading read: "Their pampered birds wear diapers and have personal chefs — but lay the finest eggs tech money can buy."

Urban chickens have been rising in popularity for years, of course. It's now a "humblebrag" to say you have your little backyard flock of hens (roosters are discouraged in urban quarters for obvious reasons). I found it interesting that the high-powered tech gurus profiled in this article enjoy their birds for the same reason I enjoy ours.

Johan Land, a tech elite, enjoys "relaxing with a glass of wine in the back yard alongside his wife, kids and the family’s 13 chickens and three sheep. It’s mindless, he said, but far from banal. 'It's a fascinating thing to sit and watch the animals because instead of looking at a screen, you're looking at the life cycle,' Land said. 'It’s very different from the abstract work that I do.'"

Yep, chickens ground people. They're not abstract. Even rural folks enjoy them.

Of course, the article then illustrates where homestead chickens depart from urban chickens: Fancy living quarters.

In true Silicon Valley fashion, chicken owners approach their birds as any savvy venture capitalist might: By throwing lots of money at a promising flock (spending as much as $20,000 for high-tech coops). By charting their productivity (number and color of eggs). And by finding new ways to optimize their birds’ happiness — as well as their own.

Instead of cobbling together a plywood coop with materials from the local hardware store, the rare birds of Silicon Valley are hiring contractors to build $20,000 coops using reclaimed materials or pricey redwood that matches their human homes. Others opt for a Williams-Sonoma coop — chemical free and made from sustainable red pine — that has been called the “Range Rover of chicken cribs.” Coops are also outfitted with solar panels, automated doors and electrical lighting — as well as video cameras that allow owners to check on their beloved birds remotely.

Like any successful start-up, broods aren’t built so much as reverse engineered. Decisions about breed selection are resolved by using engineering matrices and spreadsheets that capture “YoY growth.” Some chicken owners talk about their increasingly extravagant birds like software updates, referring to them as “Gen 1,” “Gen 2,” “Gen 3” and so on. They keep the chicken brokers of the region busy finding ever more novel birds.

While the rest of the nation spends $15 on an ordinary chicken at their local feed store, Silicon Valley residents might spend more than $350 for one heritage breed, a designation for rare, nonindustrial birds with genetic lines that can be traced back generations. They are selecting for desirable personality traits (such as being affectionate and calm — the lap chickens that are gentle enough for a child to cuddle), rarity, beauty and the ability to produce highly coveted, colored eggs.

(Um, speaking as the "rest of the nation," who spends "$15 on an ordinary chicken" at the local feed store? For $15, it had better be something durned extraordinary. I know of no one -- at all -- who would drop that kind of money on a chicken. But I digress.)

The article continues: "All of it happens in cutting-edge coops, with exorbitant veterinarian bills and a steady diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak." Some even employ personal chefs or outfit their birds with diapers so they can roam the house.

Okay, that's just silly.

And yet -- and yet, these tech gurus need to relax as much as anyone else. One so-called "chicken whisperer's" clients "are usually men in their 30s and 40s, with young families. After spending their days in front of computers, they long for a connection to nature. What they want most of all, she said, is a 'rainbow assortment' of beautiful, colored eggs in various shades of blue, olive green and speckled brown." -- due to the status symbol announcement that such eggs didn't come from Walmart. A hand-selected carton of beautiful eggs is supplanting a bottle of wine as a preferred hostess gift.

Another family notes, "Watching the chickens is one of the family’s favorite activities. They call it: 'Hillbilly television.'"

See, I get this. I get this. That's what "communing with the chickens" is all about.

My conclusion is as follows: It's hard to bury Mother Nature. The desire to connect with food sources is innate and can only be suppressed for so long before it erupts in one form or another.

We may chuckle at the waste of money -- personal chefs and "gingerbread coops" and organic salmon diets -- but in the end what these wealthy high-tech gurus are doing is exactly what I like to do: mindlessly watch the chickens cluck.

More power to them.

Egg overload

Now that the chickens are no longer trapped in their coop by deep snow, they're happy as clams exploring the barn and scratching in the compost pile. Suddenly we're finding eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.

Yesterday in the chicken coop, I happened to glance at this old battered fire screen we keep tucked inside, in case we ever need to block the door without actually closing the door.

I don't know what inspired me to pull the screen away from the wall, but this is what I saw tucked behind:

Suddenly it seemed we had eggs everywhere.

(One of these is a fake wooden egg to encourage the ladies to lay in this spot.)

Lately I've been getting about a dozen eggs a day, but suddenly I had an additional three dozen. This was in addition to the five dozen I already had in the fridge.

There was dirt and grunge on many of them...

...so I plopped the dirtiest in water to both wash and test them. (A bad egg floats; an old egg stands upright; a fresh eggs stays at the bottom of the water.)

All but four eggs passed the test.

I laid the rest out to dry; some on the dish drainer, the rest on a towel.

Fortunately we have neighbors who take eggs with great enthusiasm, and before the day was out I had distributed seven of the nine dozen eggs.

Grunt. It must be spring.

Farm kid woes

Younger Daughter was baking something the other day when she made an exclamation of annoyance.

"I love how they specify one egg in the recipe," she groused, "but they never specify what size egg. Are they talking a Jersey Giant egg? A pullet egg? What?"

I doubt the recipe-writers ever think of such things, those inconsiderate simpletons.

A leg up

This morning in the barn I noticed a hen perched on the rung of a ladder.

This ladder is placed where it is so I can get into this space between hay bales.

The reason I need to get to this space between the hay bales is because it's the latest "hot spot" for laying. But I didn't realize the hens used the ladder to get themselves six feet up. They're cleverer than I thought.

I hadn't checked this spot for a few days, and evidently a lot more hens than I thought were laying in it. They'd spilled over into two areas.

Total: 16 whole eggs plus a broken one.

Just a little slice of life on the Lewis homestead.

Dehydrating eggs

[The photos in this blog post are numbered since they are potential illustrations for a Backwoods Home Magazine article. This post is also more abbreviated than usual since the bulk of information will be contained in the article]

Over the summer, we had -- to put it mildly -- a glut of eggs. I wanted to find a suitable way to preserve the excess.

(Photo 326)

While there are numerous ways to preserve eggs, for a variety of reasons I wanted to experiment with dehydrating. There are many online references to the ease of dehydrating eggs, but nearly all of them admitted the potential for salmonella. Almost every reference I saw, people dehydrated their eggs at temperatures ranging from 125F to 145F. After some research, we learned that temp is too low, and 160F minimum (I bumped it to 165F to be safe) was necessary to keep salmonella from forming during the dehydration process.

We were in the market for a dehydrator anyway, so I began looking for a machine that achieved that temperature. To my surprise, even the most expensive dehydrators didn't go that high. I had better success with the lower-priced dehydrators and ended up ordering a Presto Digital Electric Dehydrator (model 06301) for about $65 on Amazon. I also ordered fruit roll sheets for each tray, since these are necessary to hold the liquified eggs.

(Photo 743)

Dehydrating is simple. I took five eggs at a time and blended them in a blender for a few seconds...

(Photo 756)

...then poured the liquified eggs carefully on the fruit roll sheet on each tray. The dehydrator came with six trays, which meant I could dehydrate 30 eggs at a time.

(Photo 757)

I set the temperature at 165F for ten hours.

(Photo 759)

At the end of this time, the dried eggs resemble thin peanut brittle, and the color is dark orange. (I learned that commercially dehydrated eggs are "de-sugared" before being dried, which better preserves the color and texture of the original egg.)

(Photo 746)

(Photo 747)

Some people recommend lightly oiling or spraying the fruit roll sheets so the dried eggs will slide off more easily, but I found this is absolutely NOT the case (at least, not with these particular fruit roll sheets). The eggs just slid off.

(Photo 748)

This is 30 eggs' worth of dehydrated stuff. Very compact.

(Photo 749)

I used our mini food processor to grind the dried eggs.

(Photo 750)

(Before)

(Photo 752)

(After)

(Photo 751)

30 eggs came to about four cups of granules. The dehydrated eggs have a "greasy" feel, but this is normal.

(Photo 754)

The next step was learning how well dehydrated eggs performed. To rehydrate, use a 2:1 ratio of water:egg powder. Here's one tablespoon of eggs powder...

(Photo 203)

...mixed with two tablespoons of water. Let it sit for a few minutes.

(Photo 205)

To test the dehydrated eggs in baking, I made two identical batches of cornmeal muffins. Here are the bowls of dry ingredients:

(Photo 208)

Here are the bowls of wet ingredients (dehydrated egg version is always on the left):

(Photo 207)

Ingredients mixed together.

(Photo 209)

Spooned into muffin cups, ready to bake. (By the way, I hope everyone knows the trick of filling any empty muffin spaces with water so as not to warp the pan during baking.)

(Photo 211)

Baked. This is the dehydrated egg version:

(Photo 212)

This is the fresh egg version:

(Photo 213)

Dehydrated version on the left, fresh egg version on the right. They look slightly different in size, but in fact they were almost identical (just my bad photography).

(Photo 214)

Cut open.

(Photo 215)

I couldn't taste the difference. I gave a "blind taste test" to Younger Daughter, and she couldn't tell the difference either. I give dehydrated eggs a "thumbs up" for baking purposes.

But what about direct eating? I scrambled two fresh eggs:

(Photo 219)

And I "scrambled" two tablespoons of rehydrated eggs (4 tablespoons of water):

(Photo 221)

There was no comparison. The rehydrated eggs were absolutely revolting (not to mention half the volume of the fresh eggs).

(Photo 222)

I tried rehydrating the dried eggs with milk instead of water...

(Photo 223)

...and the result was just as bad. MAJOR "thumbs down" for direct eating of rehydrated eggs.

(Photo 224)

Other people claim success in direct eating of dehydrated eggs, but I sure didn't.

Conclusion: Dehydrating eggs isn't worth it if you have to purchase eggs, but absolutely worth it if you have a surplus of your own eggs. But be safe -- don't dehydrate at temps lower than 165F or you risk salmonella poisoning.

I'm storing my dehydrated eggs in the freezer at the moment, but I will also fill some pint jars and use an oxygen absorber and store them in my canning closet, which is cool and dark.