Egghead

True Story: I Love Eggs. Sunny-side-up, poached, scrambled, fried, hard-boiled, deviled… I really love eggs. My good friends from school will tell you that I ate an egg salad sandwich almost every day during my senior year of college. This is serious business. Very fortunately for me, I now have ten feathered roommates who love eggs just as much as me, if not even more.

Meet the chickens.

The chickens are pretty hard to photograph on an iPhone as they like to run around in that typical chicken way, so please excuse the blurry faces. They are good chickens, however, and I promise they have normal faces, not blurry faces. Our chickens are free-range, organic-fed, happy, blur-free chickens. And guess what?! They make so many delicious eggs!

Right now we have four grown up hens and six little guys. The little guys aren’t so little anymore, I suppose, as they are nearly the size of the grown ups and will likely start laying any day now. Probably when it cools down a little bit. I was pretty frightened of my new roommates at first. They really like to swarm at you and peck around your feet (and maybe on your feet if your shoelaces happen to look like worms). They make weird noises and puff up and act really angry and broody (ha ha get it? broody?) when, in reality, they’re actually quite docile and silly. I am starting to become quite fond of the chickens!

Our very biggest chicken, Mabus, is a monster of a hen. I have been practicing picking up the hens lately, and today it was my grand goal to get up the guts to pick up Mabus. It happened!

I don’t know why I am making that face. Mabus is a really nice chicken. We have meaner chickens than Mabus. She is arguably the loudest of the chickens, of course, but she’s really a very amiable creature. I had no reason to be making such a face at Mabus. Sorry, little hen.

As you can imagine, we eat a lot of eggs at our place. Oftentimes, we are swimming in so many eggs that we have no idea what to do with all of them. This is when we send out SOS texts to friends and family – “DO YOU NEED ANY EGGS RIGHT NOW??” This was the case right before we went to San Francisco. Right now, unfortunately, not so much. We’re pretty sure it’s just because of the intense heat we’ve got going on right now — most of the chickens’ energy is going to staying cool. In any case, we only get an egg or two every day which we greedily cook up on the same day.

Fresh eggs? Like… layed 10 minutes ago fresh eggs? Boy, let me tell you, they’re pretty delicious.

Inspired by my old friend and fellow blogger, Rebecca Yang of Yang with a Dash of Yin, who posted a delicious recipe the other day that I’ve been drooling over for some time, I decided to finally learn how to poach these eggs. Now, I’m someone who will order an Eggs  Benedict at any chance I can get these days, and typically end up paying a premium for delicious poached eggs. I was a little nervous to try to do it myself for the very first time, but…

…It went pretty well!

I poached them very quickly so that there was still a good amount of yolk in the middle, just how I like it. I found it was really, really easy… but Blaise tells me that I’m getting spoiled by learning how to poach eggs with such fresh eggs. I hear it is a little more difficult with store bought ones.

I am very proud of my first egg poaching experience. I served it on top of a potato hash that was also pretty simple:

2 potatos
1 green onion*
1 medium garlic clove*
small handful cherry tomatoes
basil*, salt, pepper, other spices (to taste)
olive oil -or- butter

*items were pulled from our garden!

Heat up a seasoned cast iron skillet while you peel and cut both potatoes. Throw them in and stir them around with a bit of the olive oil so they are all completely coated. Salt and pepper the potatoes. Cover. Let cook for 5-8 minutes, stirring occasionally. After the potatoes have had some solo time in the skillet, toss in the garlic and green onion. Continue to cook on medium, making sure that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan, but remembering that the potatoes really do need a good amount of sustained heat-time to soften. If it’s looking like the potatoes are mostly just getting brown and burn-y, throw in a little bit of butter or oil to help them stay soft. When the potatoes are just about done, chop up some cherry tomatoes and throw them in, too. I try to avoid putting tomatoes into my hashes or stir fries until the very end because they get pretty wrinkled and acid tasting as opposed to staying sweet and succulent.

Additional goodies to put in:

kale, spinach, or any other leafy green
mushrooms
peas
carrots and/ or parsnips
avocado
lean meats

or, as pictured above….

eggs.