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Posts Tagged ‘backyard chickens’

Communing with Chickens

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged on July 24, 2012| 87 Comments »

Last Sunday, Pete and I sat in the backyard and communed with the chooks. It was a gorgeous Sydney winter’s day, and the girls had just been let out onto a new patch of the garden. They were scrambling about excitedly, scratching for grubs and slugs.

Here is our beloved Rosemary, who continues to be completely bonkers. She’s the baby of the group…

She stared me down as I tried to take a photo of her laying…

Francesca, our Italian princess (who is actually not the least bit Italian), has always been quite different to the others. She is dark, petite and the most curiously adventurous of the flock…

We made jokes about her being a grassfed chicken, as she chomped away at the weeds we held out to her. She will try to eat almost anything…

Frannie has always been our noisiest chicken, and today I filmed her carrying on.  She’s the only one who does this, and she does it regularly. We’re not really sure why – she isn’t a dominant member of the flock, but she’s certainly opinionated.  I think if she had arms, she’d wave them around…

Bertie, Maggie and Harriet were far too busy to pose for a photo!

All five ladies are doing well, although they’ve now got a little grey in their feathers and their egg production has dropped off substantially. Watching them in action left us in no doubt that they’re all still full of life!

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In My Kitchen, September 2011

Posted in In My Kitchen, tagged , , , , , on September 14, 2011| 57 Comments »

In my kitchen…

…are chocolate elephants!  This latest batch of lollypops is made with a mix of Callebaut 811 (54% cacao), Sao Thome dark origin chocolate and a small handful of Callebaut 823 milk chocolate.  Pete loves it, and I’ve had to hide them to ensure there are some left for Small Girl…

In my kitchen…

…is  a box of amazing rock sugar, a gift from our lovely friend Moo…

It’s amazing stuff, and resembles small shards of polished glass. I’ve scattered some over the top of an apple pie, and plan to coat shortbread cookies with them as well…

In my kitchen…

…is a jar of lampascioni (Italian wild onions).  I wrote about the paste a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen the whole onions for sale…

They’re deliciously bitter, in a rocket kind of way…

In my kitchen…

…are five small tubs of homemade taramosalata, because Cindy and Nic mentioned it on their blogs, and I wasn’t able to get the thought out of my head until I made a batch.  I found some fabulous roe at a Greek deli in Marrickville on my last shopping expedition with the Spice Girl.

Our recipe is here and it uses potato instead of bread, so it’s gluten-free…

In my kitchen…

…I’ve been baking knotted rolls!  Using my latest bread formula, I shaped the proved dough into baguettes and let them rise a second time.  Just before baking, I tied the long rolls into knots.  It was easy and fun to do…

In my kitchen…

…are today’s eggs.  Bless those chooks of ours, they’ve laid consistently all through winter…

In my kitchen…

…because I’m suggestible, is a copy of The Geometry of Pasta, which both C and Tandy recommended to me after my pasta shapes post.  It’s an interesting read!

. . . . .

Tell me, what’s happening in your kitchen this month?

If you’d like to do an In My Kitchen post on your own blog, please feel free  to use this format, and to leave a comment here linking back to your post.  We’d all love to see what’s happening in your kitchen every month too!

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The Humble Egg

Posted in Food & Friends, Frugal Living, tagged , , , on May 29, 2011| 65 Comments »

Before we had chickens, an egg wasn’t anything special to me.

I’d certainly bought and used a lot of them, and in more recent years, influenced by terrible accounts of battery hen farming, we’d made a concerted effort to only buy free range eggs.

But I’d never really given much thought to eggs, other than wondering whether or not there were enough in the fridge for my latest baking project. They’re relatively cheap and readily available, and as a result, I’d always taken them for granted.

It wasn’t until we finally had our own chickens that I came to appreciate how special and precious eggs really are. And whenever possible, and because we now can, I want to eat eggs from chooks I know.

Our hens do much more than just lay eggs – their primary function is actually to garden.  They dig up the spent beds, eat all the grubs and weeds, fertilise the soil, and then move onto the next patch.  The eggs are an added bonus!

Some of our chickens lay quite distinct eggs, and it always makes me happy to be able to match an egg to the chook who laid it!

Francesca’s eggs, for example, are always different from the rest, just as she is different from the rest of the flock.  They’re smaller, darker and always a little speckled.  I save these for my mum, because she loves the more petite size…

Bertha, on the other hand, lays the lightest coloured eggs, and occasionally the shell will be rough and quite pale.  We think she has a dodgy shell-gland, so her eggs aren’t usually as picture perfect as the others.   She has, on occasion, laid a shell-less egg, although she’s been in good form for months now…

Finally, it’s always easy to pick Queenie’s egg.  Our dominant hen rules the roost like a dictator, and will always insist on first pass at any protein that comes into the coop.  Her eggs are always the largest of the clutch, dwarfing Frannie’s little dark ones…

Every time I crack open one of our homegrown eggs, I feel a little wave of gratitude.  It’s like a tiny bubble of joy – I ponder whose egg it might be, admire the colour of the yolk, and think about how blessed I am to have something so fresh and magnificent to feed to my loved ones.

I know this all sounds like the ramblings of a chicken-obsessed madwoman.

I also know that it’s not possible for most people to have chickens, and I realise how incredibly fortunate we really are.

I hope though, that the next time you’re baking, you’ll spend a moment admiring the wondrousness of the humble egg, spare a thought for the chook who laid it, and thoroughly enjoy eating whatever you create with it!

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Chook Update

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , on May 7, 2011| 27 Comments »

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the ladies!

We recently moved them onto a bed of dedicated chook fodder.  As we’re a bit behind with the garden, one of the beds wasn’t planted out after the last rotation.  It was full of crops grown from the scattered grain mix the girls hadn’t eaten (millet, wheat, sunflower), as well as an assortment of green weeds.

The hens were in seventh heaven!  They were skipping over the greenery – I’d never seen a chicken skip before – scampering over mountains of plants aided by their flapping wings.

They’re all doing very well – the sudden shortening of days means they’re laying less, and we’re now getting three to five eggs a day.  I’m delighted about this – I don’t want them to wear themselves out, and we  really don’t need that many eggs all the time.

I tried to take some updated portrait shots so you could see how big they’ve all grown.  It took me a couple of days to get them all – the first lot were taken just after the dome rotation, and the second batch the following morning.

Francesca was doing a little dance…

Harriet is the fairest in colour, and sits right in the middle of the pecking order.  She was busy contemplating what her next mouthful was going to be…

Our little Maggie, formerly the most pecked and persecuted member of the flock, has grown into the largest hen of all.  When she was younger, she had all the feathers in her head pecked off by the others, which distressed me enormously.  Now she’s huge and has risen in the social order, and everyone leaves her alone…

Lovely Rosemary sat on Pete’s lap and posed for a closeup.  Hasn’t she grown up to be a big girl!

. . . . .

The following morning I went out again with my camera.  Bertie and Queenie had been moving too quickly to photograph the previous day, and I didn’t want to put up a post without them.

Don’t let the subdued morning light fool you – these two are tough, smart and seriously bossy.  Queenie sits at the top of the pecking order and has since the very beginning; Bertie is her right hand hen.

Bertha rarely stands still, and it took nearly 30 photos to get two good shots of her. Our wild, crooked chicken is still ornery and cantankerous, but Pete loves her to death. She only lifted her head for a photo because he was calling to her…

As you can see, she still has her very distinctive crooked comb.  Steve the vet once described her as matronly, and Steve the brother thinks she might have been stepped on as a chick, which would explain why she’s so lopsided…

Queenie was settled into the nesting box, making little purring noises in her throat.  She continues to rule the roost with an iron claw…

And Harriet was playing ostrich, with her head almost fully buried as she tried to dig grubs out of the soil.  Chickens really do have the fluffiest bottoms!

If you’d like to catch up on all our previous posts about the girls, please have a look at our chicken page, or at our  Cheerful Chickens blog!

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Cheerful Chickens

Posted in Frugal Living, tagged , , , on March 14, 2011| 46 Comments »

Debra of Bagni di Lucca and Beyond asked me recently how our chickens were travelling…

All six of our lovely ladies are very well – they’ve had two bed rotations since the previous post and are really enjoying their new position, which offers more shade than the previous spots.   Since the heatwave a month or so ago, they’ve been laying an average of five eggs a day, although today they delighted us with a full complement of six before lunchtime!  I rewarded them with leftover roast pork (free range of course, nothing but the best for our hardworking girls).

As a point of interest – the large egg at the front left was laid by Queenie, and the little dark speckled one to the right of it by Francesca.  Queenie continues to dominate the others, and always has first dibs at the higher protein food that goes into the enclosure, be it meat scraps or a wandering lizard.   Frannie on the other hand is the baby of the flock, and her delicate eggs reflect both her size and darker colouring.

I took the following video while we were making pickles – some of Di’s cucumbers were very large, so I removed the seeds prior to processing.  The chooks adore them, and I adore not having to throw them out!

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