Eggsperiment in the Kitchen

Meet our ladies...and gentleman! We've have had a flock of chickens of one size or another for about 14 years or so. I always wanted to live on a farm but I grew up in a small-ish town in a typcial, middle-class neighborhood. We had a backyard garden and a neighbor accross the street who raised rabbits, but that was as close as I got. So when I met my husband and moved onto his 20 acres in the foothill, it was a dream come true as well as an education. Over the years we've raised cows and pigs for meat, we've had rabbits and a horse to add to our list of pets, and, of course, chickens.

Our current flock is pretty small, but even so we get often get as many as 5 or 6 eggs each day. It's really wonderful to wake up and hear the rooster crowing... To visit the "ladies" for their daily care and have them run up to the fence to greet me. They have a surprising amount of personality and it's really fun to see which kitchen scraps they enjoy. They really love popcorn, bread and pasta.

So this post is actually about eggs - specifically a comparison of store-bought eggs versus eggs from our little flock of ladies. I can remember a time when folks made a big deal about brown eggs versus white ones. The truth is, the color has absolutely nothing to do with it. It just happens that lots of folks who raise chickens happen to raise the breeds that lay brown eggs - so back then, if you saw a brown egg, there was a really good chance that it came from a small farm. The real difference in eggs raised on a small farm is what they are fed. I've noticed our eggs are at their best when the chickens get plenty of veggie scraps added to their diet. When they don't, they really start to resemble the eggs that come from the local grocery chain.

For the purposes of today's post, I traded a neighbor a dozen of our eggs for 4 of their store-bought eggs. There's actually a lot of information about this on the web - lots of it includes nutritional studies, so I won't go into that. But for those of you who ever asked "Is there really a difference" here's a chance to see the differences for yourself and I hope you'll feel encouraged to get ahold of some eggs from your local farmer's market, chicken-raising neighbor, or to simply pull into that farmhouse that you've been driving past for ages with the "eggs for sale" sign on their fence.

Which ones in the photo below do you think are the farm-fresh eggs?

How did you do?

So, for starters, you can see the not only are the yolks of the farm-fresh eggs much darker and brighter in color, but the whites are much clearer too. What you can't tell from the photo is that the whites and yolks also hold together much better - they don't spread out as much - in fact, the yolks are quite thick, as you'll see shortly.

Let's see what happens when I poke the store-bought eggs with a whisk...

Now our farm-fresh eggs:

It may be hard to tell from the photos, but the yolks in the eggs from our own chickens are quite thick and when you poke them, they tend to hold together where the store-bought eggs spread out very readily and have fairly runny yolks. It's like the difference between heavy cream and 2% milk.

Here they are beaten up, can you tell which is which?

Look how thick the farm-fresh eggs are as I pour them into the pan to cook them - they cling to the whisk and dish:

I think scrambled eggs are the best for comparison sake...

And finally, the finished scrambled eggs...

...just in case it isn't clear which is which:

It's hard to describe the difference in flavor, but the certainly is one - you'll just have to test that out for yourself! When you're baking with farm raised eggs, just keep in mind that you may need to adjust flour quantities a bit if the eggs are extra-large.

I hope you've enjoyed this little eggsperiment! I'll be publishing a separate post to share what I did with the farm-fresh scrambled eggs as soon as I can get it put together!

Snowcaps

Hi everyone - I'm finally back, I'm sorry for the long absence - I've had a lot going on in my household lately - the kids moved back in with their mom (so the house is suddenly very empty), my parents and in-laws have been having lots of health issues and I recently left a job situation that was becoming very toxic. Time for new beginnings!

You would think with all this time on my hands that I'd be posting left and right, but honestly, realistically, I do need to find another "day" job so that has been consuming a fair amount of time and there was the holiday. My parents and sister joined us for the 4th - it was the first 4th I wasn't working in 4 years! I hope you all had a lovely, safe holiday. I neglected to take much in the way of photos - which is a shame because we had some lovely copper river salmon, grilled asparagus, roasted potatoes and watermelon margaritas...Can I just say - YUM!

This is some trail mix my husband made. It's loaded with apples and plums from our own trees that he dehydrated last fall.

We have a close, personal friend who has been supporting my cookie-baking habit by purchasing a dozen cookies from me every couple of weeks. I send him a container of cookies and when he's ready for more, he sends the container back. I'd been itching to make Snowcaps - a tasty, oreo-like variation of the Chocolate cookie recipe I used for Chocolate Salted Caramel Thumbprints which you can find here, so when his empty container was delivered to me last night, I knew just what to make him.

These are wonderfully dark chocolate cookies. In this case, I simply frost them with cream cheese frosting. Just look how dark the dough is...

...and the cookies fresh from the oven, before I hit 'em with the cream cheese frosting...

Oh no! I ran out of frosting!!! Hmmmm...Did I tell you these also make wonderful ice cream sandwiches? Well, they do! They are good...really good... Oh Darn! I guess I'll just have to get to the store and pick up some ice cream...

The cream cheese frosting recipe I use is my Grandma Marion's - both of my Grandma's were talented cooks and Grandma Marion's Carrot Cake is the best I've ever had. I'll post it here some time in the future, but I use her frosting recipe more than I make the cake since I like it on these cookies as well as on sugar cookies. The recipe makes a lot, enough for 2 cakes, and it freezes well, in fact, the frosting I used for the cookies came from the freezer from the last time I made her Carrot Cake. It comes together pretty quickly and you can go ahead and frost your cookies with it as soon as it's well blended, but if you beat it in your mixer a bit longer - you'll get a frosting that has a whipped-cream consistency - that is how I like it best.

Grandma Marion's Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 Cup Butter
8 oz Cream Cheese, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla (do not reduce vanilla, even if you halve the recipe)
1 lb powdered sugar
Milk, as needed

Cream butter, cream cheese and vanilla. Beat in one pound of powdered sugar (the recipe says to sift, but I never bother). Add milk if necessary to get the spreading consistency you prefer.

One thing about this frosting, it takes awhile to set up so be sure to allow plenty of time for the frosted cookies to dry before attempting to stack them on platters or adding them to cookie jars.

Choir Themed Cookie Platter

I've been working on a platter of cookies for a fundraiser taking place Tuesday, May 22 at the local high school where our 16 year old great-niece is involved in choir. Every year for several years now, the choir hosts a dinner theater fundraiser event called Cabaret. This will be my first year attending (and sadly our niece won't be singing) but my understanding is that essentially a talent show. The Choir Booster program (of which I just became secretary for the next 2 years - YIKES) puts on the dinner for $10/plate, a dessert auction (dessert is not part of the menu so if you want dessert you bid on something) and this year there will also be a silent auction of gift baskets and donated items. The students provide the entertainment and the dinner service.

Now, I like desserts as much as the next person but as I was trying to decide what to donate for the dessert auction I realized that although I really love to cook and bake, I'm not really a dessert maker. True, I bake cookies... a lot actually... but I only rarely make cakes, pies, cheesecakes or any other dessert items and I certainly don't make anything spectacular that anyone would bid competitively on for their dessert.

So... I decided to bake and decorate cookies. It's what I do. I thought a lot about the theme and finally placed an order over at Karen's Cookies for some new cookie cutters as well as some other goodies I needed to help my design ideas work (don't worry, I'll show you), namely black and white gel food coloring, boo-boo sticks, treble clef and piano cookie cutters to go with the musical note cutter I had purchased previously (I'm sorry, I don't remember which supplier I ordeed that one from).

It's taken almost a full week to get these cookies baked and decorated. I used this chocolate roll-out cookie recipe found on the Lila Loa blog, this recipe for Royal Icing (I use the 1/2 batch recipe) from The Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle Blog (and lots of tips from her various tutorials, which you should definitely check out), and this technique for the chalkboard effect cookies from Ali Bees Bake Shop (her video tutorials are so helpful! - I subscribe to her channel so that I won't miss any).

The small discs to the right of the Treble Clef cookies became Bass Clef cookies.

The event went well last night and I understand my platter of cookies brought in over $30.00! Woo hoo! Definitely worth the time and effort and I hope the folks who "won" them enjoyed them - I know I had fun making them!

Trying Out New Recipes

There are so many recipes I want to share with you, but there are also so many new recipes I want to try. I don't know about you but I'm always on the lookout for something new to add to my repetoire that my family will love and that I won't have to spend hours preparing. So rather than making & photographing my own recipes, I've been trying out lots of new recipes. Here are just a few of the recipes I have tried out so far.

I've recently become addicted to watching Nigella Lawson on the Cooking Channel. I especially enjoy Nigella Express and on one of my trips to the library at the first of the year (I spend a lot of time at my local library) I found the cookbook of the same name. It's absolutely packed with recipes I want to try, so I sticky noted (yes, I really said "sticky noted", no I don't suspect that's an actual word) some of them to try right away. I really love Nigella's approach to cooking - very simple techniques, lots of one pot dishes, very quickly put together, and filled with fresh, quality ingredients that won't break the bank. So Tuesday night we tried out her Sweetcorn Chowder with Toasted Tortillas. It was so simple and so delicious. I don't have a food processer so I used my blender and some of the broth to get the consistency right, but it was, as I said so delicious!

Another Nigella Lawson recipe I tried recently is her and, to be perfectly honest, am already addicted to them. I have made so many batches already they're practically a staple in our pantry now. Amanda pointed out to me that we're out several weeks agot now so I really need to make some more.

Back in January or so, I listened to an audiobook of a favorite book series of mine - the Hannah Swensen Mysteries - maybe you've heard of them? The herione owns a cookie and coffee shop and the books are absolutely filled with recipes - and all the recipes I've tried so far have been absolute winners. Joanne Fluke is the author and I understand all the recipes that go into the book are thoroughly tested. Anyway, I was listening to Key Lime Pie Murder and a cookie called "Chippers" was included in the story. These cookies have potato chips in them - being a "crunchy/salty snacker" myself, I was intrigued, but since I didn't have a hard-copy of the book, I didn't try to copy the recipe. Then, I was reading one of my favorite blogs the other day - Smitten Kitchen - lo and behold, she posted a recipe for Potato Chip Cookies! Of course, I had to try them. They are buttery, shortbready (is that even a word?), cookies with toasted pecans as well as crushed up potato chips. You should hop on over to the Smitten Kitchen, grab the recipe and give it a test drive yourself! I have since wrangled a hard-copy of Key Lime Pie Murder and tried those out too. I have to admit, I like Joanne Fluke's recipe even better. Hers recipe calls for a couple of egg yolks in the dough - so they came together a bit better. In both cases the cookies come out crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside. I did use the Smitten Ktichen's method of rolling the whole dough ball in sugar before flattening - I like them that way very much. You end up with a lovely combination of sweet/salty/crunchy/chewy. Hard to believe, right!? But I am SOLD and wholly addicted to these gems!

Our 15 year old, Arynn, was cast in the production of Les Miserables at her high school this year. She had rehearsals 4 days a week until 6 or 7:00pm - which spells L-A-T-E D-I-N-N-E-R for us. So, one day, after making not just the Potato Chip cookies but also another batch of my signature cookies (I promise, I will post this recipe - someday) for a friend of the family, I decided we'd go with a simple dinner of pasta tossed in butter and parmigiano reggiano and that I'd use my bread machine to make some bread to go along with the pasta. I have a bread machine cookbook and so far the recipes I've tried from it have been pretty good so I decided to try a new recipe from that and chose the Italian Scallion and Herb Bread. It starts with chopped scallions, dried basil, thyme and rosemary sauteed in butter then added to the other ingredients in the bread machine. The photo in the book of this particular bread showed it cut into slender pieces and toasted - so we did the same and it made for a crusty, savory accompaniment to our pasta.

I have also finally gotten around to trying out some recipes I found on Pinterest, but I'll save those for separate posts - FOP (Found On Pinterest) - that I'll try to start posting on some sort of regular schedule TBD later. I'm sure there's more I should be sharing with you but I'll call it good for now and try to get some more posts up (and add photos) in the near future! Until then, Ciao!

FOP#1: Lemon-Blueberry Yogurt Loaf

April 4th our "niece-daughter" Arynn turned 16. We totally surprised her with a trip to the mall with 4 of her close friends, followed by an overnight at our house. Arynn doesn't like pancakes *gasp*, shocking right? She's also not a fan of cake in general so we made home-made ice cream sandwiches instead of birthday cake, but I was a bit stumped on breakfast. My original plan was to do a cereal bar with a few kinds of cereal, set out cut up fruit, milk, maybe some yogurt plus juice, etc., but it turned out one of the guests has to limit her gluten intake. Said guest suggested bacon & scrambled eggs for breakfast with pancakes - but there's that whole Arynn not liking pancakes thing. So I also considered waffles, but my waffle maker only makes 2 at a time - and is in dire need of replacing. So I decide I'd make a coffee cake or something along those lines that could bake in the oven while I worked on everything else.

So to introduce a new post theme I'm going to be working on (on an as-yet-undetermined schedule) Found On Pinterest aka: FOP, I'm kicking of entry #1 with this tantalizing recipe for Lemon-Blueberry-Yogurt Loaf. This recipe has been very popular on Pinterest. When I pinned it I had just been experimenting with blueberry coffee cake and thought I wanted to add lemon to my recipe - the photo was just so pretty and the idea of lemon and blueberry together sounded amazing. Sooooo, I decided to make it for the birthday breakfast. Mine didn't come out as pretty as the photo and as I read through the comments on the Sweet Peas Kitchen blog today I noticed that she said she always thaws the berries thoroughly, then pats them dry with paper towels. I, however, broke the cardinal rule of cooking/baking and failed to read through the recipe so the berries weren't thawed. I measured them out, then left them sitting in a sieve while I mixed up the batter, then decided not to worry about thawing or rinsing them - so long story short, the "bled" all over the batter. Regardless, the bread was delicious and was a hit with all the kids (even the picky 8 year old cousin who happened to be staying with us this past week too)! It was gobbled up so quickly I didn't have a chance to take any photos. I'm really looking forward to making this again (following the instructions properly this time) and when I do, I'll be sure to take some photos and post them here.

Ready to try to recipe yourself? Hop on over to Sweet Peas Kitchen for the recipe and that photo that caught the attention of so many pinners!