The Luxury of Boiled Eggs {Recipe}

Before raising chickens, I would never have imagined myself longing for a boiled egg. I rarely made them, and when I did, they were often over cooked because I tend to wander and forget about timers. But now I give them my full attention from choosing the right egg to measuring the cooking time to peeling and savoring the final egg. Backyard chicken boiled eggs are a rarely enjoyed luxury item around here, one we're just returning to now that our replacement flock is laying eggs after the fox attack. You see, fresh chicken egg shells are stuffed full of albumin and yolk. The semi-permeable shells allow in the tiniest bit of air which forms a bigger pocket of air over the weeks of the eggs' shelf life. This air pocket is why you can tell if an egg is still good by soaking it in water - too much air and you can assume the egg is very old and potentially spoiled - and it's also what allows you to peel a boiled egg.

A plucked-from-the-nest-box-this-morning egg has a negligible air pocket and if you boil it, you have a 1 in a million chance of peeling it easily. Most likely you'll spend ten minutes picking away minuscule bits of egg shell. After a couple trips down that road, I started trying old wives tales like adding salt or vinegar to the water. No dice.

I didn't find boiling egg nirvana until I considered the brilliance of the shell. The shell is meant to keep the yolk fresh until the hen has laid a dozen or so eggs over a dozen or so days for a clutch. The container then has to handle high heat and movement while a hen incubates the egg for another twenty one days. In nature, egg shells are designed to keep their contents safely held for at least four weeks! No wonder they don't want to give up easily in the kitchen.

My process for boiling eggs now takes over a week of preparation and consideration.

Hard Boiled Backyard Eggs

1. Wash fresh eggs. This removes the "bloom", a coating that seals in the egg's moisture. Allow them to drip dry.

2. Place eggs in the fridge for about a week, uncovered. Refrigerators dry their contents due to the lower temperature and humidity. Commerical egg producers often use syrofoam, plastic, or coated cardboard egg cartons to keep a little bit of moisture around their eggs. We want the eggs to dry out a bit, so I skip the cartons and use the egg tray that came with my fridge.

3. Boil minimally. I like room temperature eggs in room temperature water, brought to a boil quickly. Then I cover the pot for 10 minutes. Alex prefers 11 or 12 minutes.

4. Chill instantly. When the timer goes off, uncover the lid and run cold water over the eggs and/or fill the pot with ice. This stops the eggs from continuing to cook.

5. Peel and eat happily. Eggs will peel without much effort. I enjoy boiled eggs as is, made into egg salad or deviled eggs, or the most extravagant preparation, Scotch Eggs.

File this under "Things You Don't Know Until You Raise Chickens". What else would you add to that list?

The Cost Of Freedom

Find the cost of freedom,

I mentioned that we recently switched our chickens from a small yard to a much larger pasture system. We loved giving our girls more space to forage and rotating them to a new area when one was hen pecked. They seemed healthier for having the freedom to roam around.

Buried in the ground,

But last Wednesday, we experienced the devastating cost of such independence. A quick and thorough predator slaughtered our entire flock save one hen hidden in the nest box.

The attack happened just after I let the birds out in the morning, a time I've never been worried about predators. The culprit, likely a fox or family of hawks, only took two bodies to presumably eat. When I returned to the yard to feed kitchen scraps, I found fourteen dead or dying bodies scattered like a crime scene.

Mother Earth will swallow you,

My heart raced, momentarily unable to believe my eyes. I didn't know what to do next. No one does in the face of such devastation.

In the end, with the advice and assistance of many friends, we buried the bodies. Our sweet rooster Shakleton, who by the dispersal of feathers clearly fought the predator, lived another eight hours but ultimately succumbed to unknown internal injuries. We buried him as well.

Lay your body down.

As overwhelming as losing the entire flock was, we have always been aware of the possibility of predator attacks. Foxes, raccoons, and hawks all frequent our property. The only way to truly protect chickens would be to confine them completely and that's not the way we wish to raise livestock. So we submit to the occasional interruption of natural predator and prey behavior.

A whole-flock loss, however, especially when the birds weren't even consumed, cannot happen again. We extended fencing on the run to make it a little harder for predators to climb and rehung buntings to deter hawks. We will add geese to the group because they will alert and possibly fight off small predators. And when we return from summer vacation, we'll adopt a dog to help guard the livestock. We're already rebuilding the flock with some chicks raised by our neighbor.

Grief over losing so many favorite birds, including our last remaining chicken from our very first group of hens, ebbs and flows but is generally abating. What still brings tears to my eyes is the outpouring of support. A half dozen friends showed up to help on the day of the slaughter and many more offered their assistance. Hundreds of friends spoke or wrote words of sympathy via social media, at the farmers market, and at our OEFFA tour. We are humbled by the number of people who encourage us.

NB. The interspersed lyrics are from the song 'Find the Cost of Freedom' recorded in 1971 by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Listen to a live 1971 recording re-released last year. I fully realize that writer Stephen Stills was likely expressing a reaction to the tragic losses in the Vietnam War and a few chickens is no comparison to those events. My father's band sings 'Find the Cost of Freedom' at the end of each performance. Practicing and performing small gigs since I was young, their rendition of this song has helped ground me through losses my entire adulthood, and the lyrics ran through my head for days last week.

The Cost Of Freedom

Find the cost of freedom,

I mentioned that we recently switched our chickens from a small yard to a much larger pasture system. We loved giving our girls more space to forage and rotating them to a new area when one was hen pecked. They seemed healthier for having the freedom to roam around.

Buried in the ground,

But last Wednesday, we experienced the devastating cost of such independence. A quick and thorough predator slaughtered our entire flock save one hen hidden in the nest box.

The attack happened just after I let the birds out in the morning, a time I've never been worried about predators. The culprit, likely a fox or family of hawks, only took two bodies to presumably eat. When I returned to the yard to feed kitchen scraps, I found fourteen dead or dying bodies scattered like a crime scene.

Mother Earth will swallow you,

My heart raced, momentarily unable to believe my eyes. I didn't know what to do next. No one does in the face of such devastation.

In the end, with the advice and assistance of many friends, we buried the bodies. Our sweet rooster Shakleton, who by the dispersal of feathers clearly fought the predator, lived another eight hours but ultimately succumbed to unknown internal injuries. We buried him as well.

Lay your body down.

As overwhelming as losing the entire flock was, we have always been aware of the possibility of predator attacks. Foxes, raccoons, and hawks all frequent our property. The only way to truly protect chickens would be to confine them completely and that's not the way we wish to raise livestock. So we submit to the occasional interruption of natural predator and prey behavior.

A whole-flock loss, however, especially when the birds weren't even consumed, cannot happen again. We extended fencing on the run to make it a little harder for predators to climb and rehung buntings to deter hawks. We will add geese to the group because they will alert and possibly fight off small predators. And when we return from summer vacation, we'll adopt a dog to help guard the livestock. We're already rebuilding the flock with some chicks raised by our neighbor.

Grief over losing so many favorite birds, including our last remaining chicken from our very first group of hens, ebbs and flows but is generally abating. What still brings tears to my eyes is the outpouring of support. A half dozen friends showed up to help on the day of the slaughter and many more offered their assistance. Hundreds of friends spoke or wrote words of sympathy via social media, at the farmers market, and at our OEFFA tour. We are humbled by the number of people who encourage us.

NB. The interspersed lyrics are from the song 'Find the Cost of Freedom' recorded in 1971 by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Listen to a live 1971 recording re-released last year. I fully realize that writer Stephen Stills was likely expressing a reaction to the tragic losses in the Vietnam War and a few chickens is no comparison to those events. My father's band sings 'Find the Cost of Freedom' at the end of each performance. Practicing and performing small gigs since I was young, their rendition of this song has helped ground me through losses my entire adulthood, and the lyrics ran through my head for days last week.

Whole Grain Chicken Feed

When we started our flock of chickens with four birds, the cost and type of food didn't matter much. We bought a fifty pound bag of commercial feed about once a month from a farm store. If the hens spilled and wasted some or the price of feed fluctuated, it didn't make a big difference to us.

Now that we have fifteen chickens, things are different. They can eat a fifty pound bag of feed in less than two weeks. As soon as City Folk's Farm Shop opened, we switched to buying feed from them. We wanted to like their organic and non-GMO offerings, but with more powder than large pieces, our hens spilled constantly. Spilling feed is not only cash on the ground but the resulting mess combines with soil moisture and begins to ferment and stink. Yuck.

When City Folk's opened their new feed mixing station, I took a class with Denise Beno to learn about whole grain chicken feed. Denise shared advantages and disadvantages to whole grains, her philosophy to feed twice a day only what they can eat in fifteen minutes (no thieving by sparrows!), and several feed mix ratios. I was sold and mixed my own feed shortly thereafter.

The girls (and guy) seem to love it. Spilling still happens but they're more likely to eat what falls because it's in bigger pieces. We're going through less feed than expected and therefore it costs less than buying high quality pre-mixed food. Cleaning the hen house has become more pleasant because the poop from whole-grain fed chickens is less prolific and less smelly in our experience.

How To Feed Chickens Whole Grain

1. Use a recipe that provides a variety of grains, protein sources, and minerals. You may change the grain mix to include cheaper/more available grains in subsequent batches but try not to change too many things at once.

2. Provide grit, oyster shell, and fresh water at all times. Hens using whole grain will consume more grit and oyster than hens on commercial pelleted feed. I made a grit and oyster shell feeder using our pvc feeder design.

3. Transition slowly by mixing in the new feed:

• Week one - 3/4 previous (commerical) feed, 1/4 whole grain mix
• Week two - 1/2 previous feed, 1/2 whole grain mix
• Week three - 1/4 previous feed, 3/4 whole grain mix
• Week four (or whenever you run out of previous feed) - 100% whole grain

4. During this time, egg production may slow a little and/or eggshells may thin as the hens get used to eating the new food, grit, and shell. After four weeks, my girls were up to their regular production and shells are thick and strong again.

5. Experiment to determine how much feed you need. Denise recommended 1/3 pound per chicken per day, which would be 5 pounds per day for my flock but they're actually eating 3.5-4 pounds per day. The difference may be that some of my chickens are bantams and it's winter so they aren't expending much energy foraging. We also feed all the table scraps they will eat.

Rachel's Whole Grain Layer Feed Mix

Makes 50#

12.5# whole oats 12.5# wheat 12.5# cracked corn 1.5# fish meal 2.5# alfalfa pellets (not my hen's favorite and can be eliminated with good pasture) 7.5# whole soy beans 1 # mineral supplement

Whole Grain Chicken Feed

When we started our flock of chickens with four birds, the cost and type of food didn't matter much. We bought a fifty pound bag of commercial feed about once a month from a farm store. If the hens spilled and wasted some or the price of feed fluctuated, it didn't make a big difference to us.

Now that we have fifteen chickens, things are different. They can eat a fifty pound bag of feed in less than two weeks. As soon as City Folk's Farm Shop opened, we switched to buying feed from them. We wanted to like their organic and non-GMO offerings, but with more powder than large pieces, our hens spilled constantly. Spilling feed is not only cash on the ground but the resulting mess combines with soil moisture and begins to ferment and stink. Yuck.

When City Folk's opened their new feed mixing station, I took a class with Denise Beno to learn about whole grain chicken feed. Denise shared advantages and disadvantages to whole grains, her philosophy to feed twice a day only what they can eat in fifteen minutes (no thieving by sparrows!), and several feed mix ratios. I was sold and mixed my own feed shortly thereafter.

The girls (and guy) seem to love it. Spilling still happens but they're more likely to eat what falls because it's in bigger pieces. We're going through less feed than expected and therefore it costs less than buying high quality pre-mixed food. Cleaning the hen house has become more pleasant because the poop from whole-grain fed chickens is less prolific and less smelly in our experience.

How To Feed Chickens Whole Grain

1. Use a recipe that provides a variety of grains, protein sources, and minerals. You may change the grain mix to include cheaper/more available grains in subsequent batches but try not to change too many things at once.

2. Provide grit, oyster shell, and fresh water at all times. Hens using whole grain will consume more grit and oyster than hens on commercial pelleted feed. I made a grit and oyster shell feeder using our pvc feeder design.

3. Transition slowly by mixing in the new feed:

• Week one - 3/4 previous (commerical) feed, 1/4 whole grain mix
• Week two - 1/2 previous feed, 1/2 whole grain mix
• Week three - 1/4 previous feed, 3/4 whole grain mix
• Week four (or whenever you run out of previous feed) - 100% whole grain

4. During this time, egg production may slow a little and/or eggshells may thin as the hens get used to eating the new food, grit, and shell. After four weeks, my girls were up to their regular production and shells are thick and strong again.

5. Experiment to determine how much feed you need. Denise recommended 1/3 pound per chicken per day, which would be 5 pounds per day for my flock but they're actually eating 3.5-4 pounds per day. The difference may be that some of my chickens are bantams and it's winter so they aren't expending much energy foraging. We also feed all the table scraps they will eat.

Rachel's Whole Grain Layer Feed Mix

Makes 50#

12.5# whole oats 12.5# wheat 12.5# cracked corn 1.5# fish meal 2.5# alfalfa pellets (not my hen's favorite and can be eliminated with good pasture) 7.5# whole soy beans 1 # mineral supplement

Doing What's Right On A Friday Night

I don't know about your Friday nights but ours are usually pretty tame. We switch off cooking gourmet dinners with friends. We come home, put Lil to bed, and maybe watch a movie. I try to go to sleep early because I work at the Farmers' Market in the morning. No big deal. But this week, the homestead necessities interrupted our relaxing week end plans.

We canceled dinner with friends because Lil has been battling a cough for days on end. It comes on at night and we're all beyond exhausted from 3 am coughing spells. We planned a quiet evening at home.

Chores still had to be done, of course. On my afternoon visit to the chicken coop with fresh warm water, I noticed Cirrus, our Salmon Faverolle chicken, with what looked like a shell-less egg and some poop frozen to her rear. Ick. I knew there could be several causes of this but at a minimum the frozen stuff had to come off.

I brought her inside for a soak in warm water. She didn't resist and I added 'bathed a chicken' to my homesteader resume. Next came my 'cloaca anatomy' test. I don't claim expert knowledge in this area, but anyone could tell Cirrus was not well back there.

Lil helped me set her up with water, food, and bedding in a dog crate so she could dry off and we could see if she improved with a little warmth and rest. I consulted with local chicken folks and BackyardChickens.com, determining she had a prolapsed cloaca.

Culling a Sick Hen

I'll spare more details but after Lil's bedtime, Alex and I  determined that Cirrus was not well and very unlikely to heal under the circumstances. We looked at a shivering restless bird and knew our Friday night must take a dark turn.

Alex did the deed and I heated a pot of water. If the issue was only a physical abnormality, we could make soup from her, wasting nothing from her well-lived existence. I plucked her prodigious creamy orange feathers, marveling at how different this heritage bird was from the creepy meats. Alas, the plucking revealed signs of infection. The ground frozen, we had to throw her body in the trash rather than bury her. Rest In Peace, Cirrus.

We never want to cull a sick hen, least of all after an exhausting week. It took several hours for me to wind down from making the unfortunate decision to end an animal's suffering. While the evening was decidedly more grueling and stinky than expected, we know we spent Friday night doing what was right.

Doing What's Right On A Friday Night

I don't know about your Friday nights but ours are usually pretty tame. We switch off cooking gourmet dinners with friends. We come home, put Lil to bed, and maybe watch a movie. I try to go to sleep early because I work at the Farmers' Market in the morning. No big deal. But this week, the homestead necessities interrupted our relaxing week end plans.

We canceled dinner with friends because Lil has been battling a cough for days on end. It comes on at night and we're all beyond exhausted from 3 am coughing spells. We planned a quiet evening at home.

Chores still had to be done, of course. On my afternoon visit to the chicken coop with fresh warm water, I noticed Cirrus, our Salmon Faverolle chicken, with what looked like a shell-less egg and some poop frozen to her rear. Ick. I knew there could be several causes of this but at a minimum the frozen stuff had to come off.

I brought her inside for a soak in warm water. She didn't resist and I added 'bathed a chicken' to my homesteader resume. Next came my 'cloaca anatomy' test. I don't claim expert knowledge in this area, but anyone could tell Cirrus was not well back there.

Lil helped me set her up with water, food, and bedding in a dog crate so she could dry off and we could see if she improved with a little warmth and rest. I consulted with local chicken folks and BackyardChickens.com, determining she had a prolapsed cloaca.

Culling a Sick Hen

I'll spare more details but after Lil's bedtime, Alex and I  determined that Cirrus was not well and very unlikely to heal under the circumstances. We looked at a shivering restless bird and knew our Friday night must take a dark turn.

Alex did the deed and I heated a pot of water. If the issue was only a physical abnormality, we could make soup from her, wasting nothing from her well-lived existence. I plucked her prodigious creamy orange feathers, marveling at how different this heritage bird was from the creepy meats. Alas, the plucking revealed signs of infection. The ground frozen, we had to throw her body in the trash rather than bury her. Rest In Peace, Cirrus.

We never want to cull a sick hen, least of all after an exhausting week. It took several hours for me to wind down from making the unfortunate decision to end an animal's suffering. While the evening was decidedly more grueling and stinky than expected, we know we spent Friday night doing what was right.

Creepy Meats - On Raising Cornish Cross Meat Chickens

The story below contains details about the process of raising meat chickens but no graphic images or descriptions of the slaughter.

My friends Ohio Farm Girl and Lyndsey Teeter refer to Cornish Cross meat chickens as 'creepy meats'. I had no idea what they were talking about and blindly ordered six chicks to try our hand at raising meat on our very own property.

In four weeks the tiny chicks ballooned into squishy, barely feathered tweens bigger than the laying hens we had been raising for eighteen weeks already. They didn't forage, cluck, respond to us, or even kick up the grass under their chicken tractor. Creepy meats have exactly three tasks in life - eat, drink, and poop.

Caring for cornish cross chickens took us less than 15 minutes a day, whereas Lil typically spends an hour visiting, feeding, watering, and collecting eggs from the hens. The creepy meats had no personality to enjoy or activities that required our input.

When they were six weeks old, we began to discuss their demise. We weighed one and decided they could probably eat for a few more weeks to put on more weight and make our plucking time worth it.

By eight weeks, our cornish cross chicks could barely waddle up the ramp to the roost at night. Their eat-sleep-poop routine had become so vigorous that we were moving the tractor every two days to prevent them from laying in their own waste. It was time.

The Butchering

"Are you butchering them yourself?" friends and family asked. Of course. We're practiced in chicken slaughter and believe in the process of meeting your meat. Besides, with the cost of all the other inputs (see below), it didn't make financial sense to drive them to pay a processor.

On Sunday morning, we set up a borrowed homemade cone on a ladder with catch bucket underneath. Next to that was our propane turkey fryer with a pot of water. Then a table with sharpened knives, waste bucket, towels and cutting boards. Finally we had a bucket of cool water for rinsing/chilling and a cooler of ice.

The process was quick: Alex did the deed, I plucked, he eviscerated, and I cleaned up. With interruptions to console Lil (she didn't like the squawking the birds made when we picked them up, nor the after-life shaking), processing six birds took an hour an a half from setup to cleanup.

We left the chickens buried in ice for twenty four hours to go through the rigor mortis process. The next day, we vacuum sealed three whole chickens and three in pieces. Alex made pate from the liver and stock from the feet, necks, and scraps.

Raising Meat Birds By The Numbers

$15 for five chicks plus one bonus chick for no charge $0 gas because a friend nicely did the driving for a jar of sourdough starter $61.50 for 125 pounds of non-GMO local feed 20 wheelbarrow loads of free woodchips spread over the waste so flies wouldn't set in 90 minutes processing $5 ice and vac bags 24 pounds of chicken in the freezer 3/4 pint liver pate 8 1/2 pints stock

Total cost: $81.50 (not including our time or existing equipment like tractor coop, processing tools, vacuum sealer) Price per pound: $3.02 (counting pate and stock as 3 pounds of meat)

We Won't Raise Cornish Cross Again

Cornish Cross meat birds are amazing grain-to-protein machines. No other breed is able to mature in eight weeks with such high quality, tasty meat.

However, we like chickens that do more than just make protein. We want birds that can provide a foraging and soil-turning benefit since the cost of raising them ourselves barely saves a cent over buying from a reputable local seller. If they can add to the fun and beauty of the homestead, even better.

When the summer heat passes, we'll try another round of meat birds but they won't be Cornish Cross. The breeds we're looking at will mature slower but provide a value beyond meat, whether that's a taste benefit (Buckeyes), foraging/mowing (Freedom Ranger) or soil turning (both of the above).

Have you raised meat birds before? What was your experience?

PS. If you are interested in witnessing and learning how to slaughter a chicken, our friend Denise is hosting a hands-on butchering class through City Folk's Farm Shop.