Love eggs! Love your writing! A perfect Easter combo. The image of inebriated Campsite Tony in his flappy dressing gown beaming at your proffered egg box was worth the price of admission alone🥚🥚🥚🤣
I loved this so much the first time and perhaps even more this time around. What a fabulously written tale!
I do enjoy the egg honesty boxes everywhere on our rural island, and just today saw a range of small sprouted herbs in pots for sale, listed on a carefully lettered blackboard leaning up against the storage box. Such a refreshing way to ‘do business.’
Thanks, Jen! I still think back about that faraway egg supplier and the boxes from all over everywhere. Perhaps I’ll imagine a story about whoever came across the egg boxes I’d left….. 🥰
Another delightful romp, Rebecca! Thank you. Loved this: "...a large flock of white geese so plump that we guessed they weren’t much looking forward to Christmas." The photos of the feather-straw eggs is lovely.
There's something I don't understand, re that sign. Were the chickens deranged, or the eir eggs? And what effect would it have on a person if they ate deranged eggs. Would be like eating British beef at the height of the mad cow disease epidemic?
Also, although this was a very chortelsome and interesting post, why didn't you talk about creme eggs? I mean, what sort of hens do they come from?
I think the sign is worded to show that it is the chickens who are deranged!
I'm sorry that I didn't touch on Cadbury's Creme Eggs this time, but you may recall that a couple of Easters ago my parents' girls laid chocolate eggs for them to collect! Here's a reminder:
My friend dropped by with two dozen eggs yesterday to enrich our Easter. We paid her back with a full sack of empty egg boxes and a loaf of fresh bread. Eggs make wonderful currency!
This account is a treasure, in my eyes, Rebecca. I started my reply earlier, but I wandered off on something important. So did that first start! No doubt plenty of Substack rules I don’t know about. I promise to be more observant of your posts and comments in the future.
Happy Easter! Even if the celebration is one of creatively coloring eggs. 🌞
Oh, how lovely Gary, thank you! And hey, no pressure from me! I’m very, very behind on my own reading (and writing, but reading especially) on Substack and I feel rather a heel for not keeping up with the fabulous writing of so many others!
Great to see you at the Write Along yesterday - I’d missed soooo many sessions, and it was super to get back to it. 😁
Good morning/afternoon, Rebecca! Owing to some nagging medical problems - just don’t call it aging - one doctor appointment after another has blocked my attendance of RunToWrite. Naturally I smiled when I saw you were in attendance yesterday as well. Happy Spring and more.
I smiled to myself when I realized you were present. I’d become more than a bit rusty, having missed repeatedly for nearly two months. I value the sense of community! May part of “the best” include fresh bird nest construction!
I had such a lovely (and very productive!) hour at the Write Along yesterday. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I hadn’t been at my desk for ages, nor have I been writing very much or very often at all, but you and the other participants have given me exactly the boost I needed. Thank you so, so much. xxx
Hi Rebecca, Thank you so much for this amazing message. I was thrilled to see you yesterday! :) I'm so happy to hear it was the space you needed to restart. :) Have a fantastic week! (also I'll be in touch via email about UK...how wonderful if we could make it work)
All thing considered, Tony's eggs were cleaner than most of the eggs I'd dig out of my hen house. harrumph! But once scrubbed and dried, they were sumptuous. Your van trips sound like a lot of fun, full of little adventures like this. Happy trails!
LOL! They weren’t too bad really - Tony’s eggs were certainly a little better turned out than he was! 🤣
Over here eggs aren’t washed before sale, and that’s why in UK we don’t need to refrigerate them. Shelf life is at least three weeks at ambient temperature. We don’t wash our homegrown eggs either, actually!
The only country in the world that washes its eggs is the US. We're like the soldier marching in the parade who's out of step with all the others and his mother is in the stands saying, "my son is the only one who's marching correctly." 🙄 The humbling we are now getting on the world stage is richly deserved.
Is that true? Gosh! I’ve always wondered why eggs need to be washed, because if the hen houses are cleaned regularly then they shouldn’t get mucky. As soon as a new-laid egg has dried (not from washing, but once it comes out of the hen!) then that’s a lovely seal around the egg which of course is then removed if it’s washed!
When I lived in Germany I loved to buy a couple of Frühstückseier (breakfast eggs) on my way to work sometimes. They were hardboiled eggs offered for sale in 12×12 trays - you’d just pick up however many you wanted - and until their natural colour was covered up, they were white eggs but which had a layer of bright, bright coloured resin-like film over the top. They looked extraordinary. You’d get green, yellow, pink and blue eggs all in the same tray, and they were beautiful. That coloured layer of ‘sealant’, for want of a better word, was what made it possible for the shops to sell the eggs unrefrigerated, because it drastically (by weeks and months, even) increased the shelf life of cooked eggs.
Whoa! Those are brilliant! But that's a post-cleaning coat of armor. A freshly laid never been fooled around with egg has its own "bloom" that seals the pores in the shell as well as gives the egg its far more subdued color. Cleaning hen houses depends on the ambition and dedication and time allowances of the grower. I would put fresh straw in the house about once every two weeks and shovel out the manure space under the roosts. Hens like to make their own little nests, but sometimes will share a nest or two and lay all their eggs there. Most of my eggs would need only a dust off and brief (very brief) run under the water. I didn't scrub off the bloom, which takes a bit of elbow grease and sense of purpose. Sometimes, the hens would lose their ... sh*t in the nest and give me a bit more work to do. Store bought eggs are subjected to health department regulations that require totally scrubbed eggs which would then be dipped in linseed oil to replace the bloom. Frankly, that was unnecessary, but far be it from me to argue with the health department and the squeamish nature of consumers. Farmers build up an incredible disease resistance because of their hanging around with animals everyday. I've got to question what's in the coating that the Germans use for their spectacular eggs. And if they're hard-boiled, there's really no reason to refrigerate them. They'd probably withstand a nuclear blast.
Oh wow, thanks for taking me through the process, Sue! That’s amazing! The idea of linseed oil horrifies me!
Hardboiled eggs do take on a funny flavour, I find, if they go several days without being refrigerated. It’s fine now we’ve got the van (with its own fridge!) but Jim and I used to use hotels when travelling for his work, and I’d always take half a dozen hardboiled eggs with me for snacks. On day four or five they’d begin to taste different. That’s not the case with the German eggs, though - they would last many, many weeks!
I was talking to my husband last night about this and he corrected me on the oil. It's mineral oil the big producers use in their egg washes, NOT LINSEED. Meanwhile, what prompted that discussion was a video I saw on FB about a new product for scrubbing the merde and debris off eggs. It's a cute little soft rubber cup. So. since lots of people have taken up raising chickens for eggs as a "hobby" over here, that's going to be a best seller for awhile. I hope it lives up to its claims. My daughter has chickens and will inherit our henhouse when she moves to her new house. She has such massive plans for becoming a small farmer, it's exciting to see. Have a great day, Rebecca, and enjoy those German eggs. I'll bet they're delish.
What a charming story about eggs. Fresh ones are special. Store bought doesn’t compare. We had a dearth here in the US for a while because of the bird flu. Lucky for us our neighbor has chickens and was happy to sell to us. Delish! Even baked goods turn out better.
Thanks so much, Carissa! I’ve heard about the lack of eggs - and the sheer expense of the things! - in the US at the moment. It’s a worry. We’re very fortunate to be able to buy free-range eggs at the Village Stores which are supplied by a farm very local to us. Extra yummy are the ones our next-door-neighbours bring us if they’ve got a surplus, and of course sometimes we’re lucky enough to be given some from Mum and Dad’s ‘girls’. Happy sigh. x
If free range chicken eggs come from hens that wander, I wonder if the deranged ones, like that Jack Russell relegated to the floor, come from chickens who are not allowed to do so.
Tiny Rebecca is *darling* and I could not agree more with your assessment that the chicken coop is a place to find serenity. Except maybe when the egg laying is going on!
When we raised laying hens and sold eggs at the farmers market, I got a chuckle from using the "hen fruit" label just to keep people on their toes. 🥚
'Hen fruit' - oh, I absolutely love this expression, Elizabeth! When I had my ducks - the quackles - they laid 'quackleberries'!
And gosh, yes, the hen house is a very noisy place to be once those announcements are being made by the girls that 'I HAVE LAID AN EGG AND I'M GOING TO TELL EVERYONE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD ABOUT IT FOR ABSOLUTELY AGES BECAUSE IT'S SO EXCITING'. Man, they get LOUD!
Looked for a chocolate egg yesterday from Coco, our maran, but was disappointed, only chocolate coloured!
Well, that won’t do AT ALL! Everyone knows she needs to lay chocolate eggs at Easter! 🐣❤️😘🐓
Love eggs! Love your writing! A perfect Easter combo. The image of inebriated Campsite Tony in his flappy dressing gown beaming at your proffered egg box was worth the price of admission alone🥚🥚🥚🤣
LOL Vicki - thank you very much! Tony was certainly a character! Extraordinary - and very generous - chap! x
Love...
🥰 Always so kind - thank you, Prue! x
Love it, love it, love it. Hic!!! 😃
😘
I loved this so much the first time and perhaps even more this time around. What a fabulously written tale!
I do enjoy the egg honesty boxes everywhere on our rural island, and just today saw a range of small sprouted herbs in pots for sale, listed on a carefully lettered blackboard leaning up against the storage box. Such a refreshing way to ‘do business.’
Oh Sabrina, thank you so very much - and how lovely to find treasures other than eggs for sale at the roadside. It’s a super system, isn’t it? x
Wonderful story! I love the idea of finding egg cartons from a faraway land.
Thanks, Jen! I still think back about that faraway egg supplier and the boxes from all over everywhere. Perhaps I’ll imagine a story about whoever came across the egg boxes I’d left….. 🥰
Another delightful romp, Rebecca! Thank you. Loved this: "...a large flock of white geese so plump that we guessed they weren’t much looking forward to Christmas." The photos of the feather-straw eggs is lovely.
Awww, thank you, Sharron! x
There's something I don't understand, re that sign. Were the chickens deranged, or the eir eggs? And what effect would it have on a person if they ate deranged eggs. Would be like eating British beef at the height of the mad cow disease epidemic?
Also, although this was a very chortelsome and interesting post, why didn't you talk about creme eggs? I mean, what sort of hens do they come from?
I think the sign is worded to show that it is the chickens who are deranged!
I'm sorry that I didn't touch on Cadbury's Creme Eggs this time, but you may recall that a couple of Easters ago my parents' girls laid chocolate eggs for them to collect! Here's a reminder:
https://rebeccaholden.substack.com/p/65-hiding-in-the-hen-house
I DO remember, that's why I asked!
😁 Awwwww!
My friend dropped by with two dozen eggs yesterday to enrich our Easter. We paid her back with a full sack of empty egg boxes and a loaf of fresh bread. Eggs make wonderful currency!
Oh, that sounds like the PERFECT exchange, Kerry! How wonderful! x
This account is a treasure, in my eyes, Rebecca. I started my reply earlier, but I wandered off on something important. So did that first start! No doubt plenty of Substack rules I don’t know about. I promise to be more observant of your posts and comments in the future.
Happy Easter! Even if the celebration is one of creatively coloring eggs. 🌞
Oh, how lovely Gary, thank you! And hey, no pressure from me! I’m very, very behind on my own reading (and writing, but reading especially) on Substack and I feel rather a heel for not keeping up with the fabulous writing of so many others!
Great to see you at the Write Along yesterday - I’d missed soooo many sessions, and it was super to get back to it. 😁
Good morning/afternoon, Rebecca! Owing to some nagging medical problems - just don’t call it aging - one doctor appointment after another has blocked my attendance of RunToWrite. Naturally I smiled when I saw you were in attendance yesterday as well. Happy Spring and more.
Oh, well, how lovely that we were there together for our first time back in a while! Hurrah! Sending you all the best, Gary!
I smiled to myself when I realized you were present. I’d become more than a bit rusty, having missed repeatedly for nearly two months. I value the sense of community! May part of “the best” include fresh bird nest construction!
Wonderful to read this today, Rebecca xx. Have a blessed Easter.
Oh, thank you so much, Julie!
I had such a lovely (and very productive!) hour at the Write Along yesterday. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I hadn’t been at my desk for ages, nor have I been writing very much or very often at all, but you and the other participants have given me exactly the boost I needed. Thank you so, so much. xxx
Hi Rebecca, Thank you so much for this amazing message. I was thrilled to see you yesterday! :) I'm so happy to hear it was the space you needed to restart. :) Have a fantastic week! (also I'll be in touch via email about UK...how wonderful if we could make it work)
It was brilliant! And yes, fingers crossed! xxx
What a lovely read to start my day.
Thank you, Kate - you’re very kind. Thank you for reading!
All thing considered, Tony's eggs were cleaner than most of the eggs I'd dig out of my hen house. harrumph! But once scrubbed and dried, they were sumptuous. Your van trips sound like a lot of fun, full of little adventures like this. Happy trails!
LOL! They weren’t too bad really - Tony’s eggs were certainly a little better turned out than he was! 🤣
Over here eggs aren’t washed before sale, and that’s why in UK we don’t need to refrigerate them. Shelf life is at least three weeks at ambient temperature. We don’t wash our homegrown eggs either, actually!
The only country in the world that washes its eggs is the US. We're like the soldier marching in the parade who's out of step with all the others and his mother is in the stands saying, "my son is the only one who's marching correctly." 🙄 The humbling we are now getting on the world stage is richly deserved.
Is that true? Gosh! I’ve always wondered why eggs need to be washed, because if the hen houses are cleaned regularly then they shouldn’t get mucky. As soon as a new-laid egg has dried (not from washing, but once it comes out of the hen!) then that’s a lovely seal around the egg which of course is then removed if it’s washed!
When I lived in Germany I loved to buy a couple of Frühstückseier (breakfast eggs) on my way to work sometimes. They were hardboiled eggs offered for sale in 12×12 trays - you’d just pick up however many you wanted - and until their natural colour was covered up, they were white eggs but which had a layer of bright, bright coloured resin-like film over the top. They looked extraordinary. You’d get green, yellow, pink and blue eggs all in the same tray, and they were beautiful. That coloured layer of ‘sealant’, for want of a better word, was what made it possible for the shops to sell the eggs unrefrigerated, because it drastically (by weeks and months, even) increased the shelf life of cooked eggs.
https://digitalcosmonaut.com/colored-eggs-german-supermarket-easter/#:~:text=So%20those%20colored%20eggs%20that,that's%20the%20first%20mystery%20solved.
Whoa! Those are brilliant! But that's a post-cleaning coat of armor. A freshly laid never been fooled around with egg has its own "bloom" that seals the pores in the shell as well as gives the egg its far more subdued color. Cleaning hen houses depends on the ambition and dedication and time allowances of the grower. I would put fresh straw in the house about once every two weeks and shovel out the manure space under the roosts. Hens like to make their own little nests, but sometimes will share a nest or two and lay all their eggs there. Most of my eggs would need only a dust off and brief (very brief) run under the water. I didn't scrub off the bloom, which takes a bit of elbow grease and sense of purpose. Sometimes, the hens would lose their ... sh*t in the nest and give me a bit more work to do. Store bought eggs are subjected to health department regulations that require totally scrubbed eggs which would then be dipped in linseed oil to replace the bloom. Frankly, that was unnecessary, but far be it from me to argue with the health department and the squeamish nature of consumers. Farmers build up an incredible disease resistance because of their hanging around with animals everyday. I've got to question what's in the coating that the Germans use for their spectacular eggs. And if they're hard-boiled, there's really no reason to refrigerate them. They'd probably withstand a nuclear blast.
Oh wow, thanks for taking me through the process, Sue! That’s amazing! The idea of linseed oil horrifies me!
Hardboiled eggs do take on a funny flavour, I find, if they go several days without being refrigerated. It’s fine now we’ve got the van (with its own fridge!) but Jim and I used to use hotels when travelling for his work, and I’d always take half a dozen hardboiled eggs with me for snacks. On day four or five they’d begin to taste different. That’s not the case with the German eggs, though - they would last many, many weeks!
I was talking to my husband last night about this and he corrected me on the oil. It's mineral oil the big producers use in their egg washes, NOT LINSEED. Meanwhile, what prompted that discussion was a video I saw on FB about a new product for scrubbing the merde and debris off eggs. It's a cute little soft rubber cup. So. since lots of people have taken up raising chickens for eggs as a "hobby" over here, that's going to be a best seller for awhile. I hope it lives up to its claims. My daughter has chickens and will inherit our henhouse when she moves to her new house. She has such massive plans for becoming a small farmer, it's exciting to see. Have a great day, Rebecca, and enjoy those German eggs. I'll bet they're delish.
What a charming story about eggs. Fresh ones are special. Store bought doesn’t compare. We had a dearth here in the US for a while because of the bird flu. Lucky for us our neighbor has chickens and was happy to sell to us. Delish! Even baked goods turn out better.
Thanks so much, Carissa! I’ve heard about the lack of eggs - and the sheer expense of the things! - in the US at the moment. It’s a worry. We’re very fortunate to be able to buy free-range eggs at the Village Stores which are supplied by a farm very local to us. Extra yummy are the ones our next-door-neighbours bring us if they’ve got a surplus, and of course sometimes we’re lucky enough to be given some from Mum and Dad’s ‘girls’. Happy sigh. x
If free range chicken eggs come from hens that wander, I wonder if the deranged ones, like that Jack Russell relegated to the floor, come from chickens who are not allowed to do so.
Tiny Rebecca is *darling* and I could not agree more with your assessment that the chicken coop is a place to find serenity. Except maybe when the egg laying is going on!
When we raised laying hens and sold eggs at the farmers market, I got a chuckle from using the "hen fruit" label just to keep people on their toes. 🥚
Hope you had a lovely Easter, Rebecca!
'Hen fruit' - oh, I absolutely love this expression, Elizabeth! When I had my ducks - the quackles - they laid 'quackleberries'!
And gosh, yes, the hen house is a very noisy place to be once those announcements are being made by the girls that 'I HAVE LAID AN EGG AND I'M GOING TO TELL EVERYONE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD ABOUT IT FOR ABSOLUTELY AGES BECAUSE IT'S SO EXCITING'. Man, they get LOUD!
The second telling/reading is as lovely as the first. Love Sky, Goldie and Speckles, too. Beautiful!