On Eggs and Chickens

Can YOURS do that?? 😉

I love eggs.  I eat at least 2-3 eggs nearly EVERY SINGLE DAY and have been eating that amount for at least 3 years now.  When I am pregnant I will sometimes eat as many as 6 or 8 eggs a day, usually in chocolate smoothies with raw milk from our goats, cocoa poowder and sweetened with stevia.

Eggs are so awesome.  It was one of the first food products that we ever became 100% self-sufficient in.  Our chickens are 100% free range, they have total access to every square inch of our little homestead…other than the garden patches which are fenced in to keep them, and other critters (including children!) OUT.  But 9 acres is plenty for them to roam and they often forage in the pasture of the Black Angus Cattle Farmer who lives behind us, he has a smaller pasture that is right next door, the chickens LOVE going over there and in the goat pen to eat goat poop, chickens LOVE goat poop.  I also give them most of our food scraps (what they won’t eat the dog eats).  And all of this they take and very efficiently turn into delicious eggs and, eventually, meat for us….and it’s virtually FREE!

This is the way chickens are supposed to be raised, and when they are raised this way their eggs become a superfood!  Most people don’t understand that the diet of the hen greatly effects the overall nutritional quality of the egg.  So commercial eggs, available at any average grocery store, coming from hens that live in confinement and fed mostly GMO corn or GMO soybeans, are NOT a healthy thing…and at this point I wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole, but instead I’d take that $2-$3 and buy a bag of organic brown rice…THAT is how unhealthy I believe them to be.  But eggs that are a natural byproduct of the land, from healthy happy chickens running around, are delicious and super nutritious!  It all has to do with the source, the way the animal is raised.

let's compare: on the left is an "Eggland's Best" egg from hens fed a vegetarian diet (chickens are OMNIVORES, idiots) and on the right is an egg from one of my hens...which egg looks tastier??

According to the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 2 large commercially raised eggs contain:

• 62% of your recommended daily allowance (RDA) of Vitamin K
• 34% of your RDA of Selenium
• 30% of your RDA of Vitamin B2
• 20% of your RDA of Protein
• 16% of your RDA of Vitamin B12
• 16% of your RDA of Phosphorus
• 12% of your RDA of Folate
• 12% of your RDA of Vitamin D
• 12% of your RDA of Vitamin A
• 8% of your RDA of Zinc
• 8% of your RDA of Vitamin B6
• 8% of your RDA of Iron
• 6% of your RDA of Vitamin E
• And 6% of your RDA of calories, based on a 2,000 calorie diet…which is the most awesome part for people who are trying to lose weight….you get ALL that nutrition and for very few calories, only 70 per egg!

If this amount of nutrition is said to be in commercial eggs, just imagine the amount of nutrition coming from a homegrown farm egg!  A good indicator of nutrition is to look at the yolk, the darker orange the yolk the more nutrition it has…likewise the paler yellow the yolk, the less nutrition it has.

Eggs and chicken meat are all so versatile.  In the spring/summer/fall months, when there is plenty coming from the garden, I can virtually live off of just eggs and vegetables with a bit of chicken meat (or broth made from the bones) added in every other day or so.  This is such a healthy way to live and my body always feels SO GOOD on this kind of diet. I can’t help but think to myself all winter long how much easier this weight loss thing would be if it were summer and I could eat what makes me feel best.  Eggs are also fantastic for babies, I always start my babies on eating 1 soft cooked egg yolk with a bit of real sea salt and a dab of coconut oil mixed in, when they are 6 months old….only 1 of my babies has ever gotten sick before the age of 1 year.

LOVE eggs 😀

Chickens are not hard to raise either.  You can easily keep a few hens in the average sized backyard.  It’s the roosters that crow and make a lot of noise…but you don’t need a rooster to get eggs.  The hens are usually pretty quiet, some of the more quiet breeds are Buff Orpingtons and any of the Brahma breeds.  The can live in any small building, even a dog house…3 or 4 hens can easily live in a dog house made for a large dog.  When we first moved here in 2009, the previous owner had been breeding and raising Blue Tick Hounds for a living and he left several old dog houses here (along with dog crap everywhere and empty food cans!  grrrrrrr) and the chickens lived in those dog houses just fine until we were able to build a small coop for them…and now that our flock has doubled in size we will be adding onto the coop very soon…

We also have a few ducks, and while they are fun their eggs don’t taste as good as chicken eggs so I mostly save their eggs for baking….ducks are best used for meat, in my opinion…

Last year we bought an incubator and took our own eggs and incubated them and raised over 50 chickens that way, about 1/3  of those were roosters that we ate very young when the meat is still tender and delicious.  It was also a lot of fun for the kids, making for an excellent home school science project!  We plan to do the same thing again this year…there is nothing cuter in the world than a baby chick! 🙂  (except for maybe baby humans…and kittens..)

A homemade quiche...made with RAMPS (wild leeks...a WV delicacy!) from our woods, eggs from our hens and milk and goat cheese from our goats.