An Abundance of Eggs

The hens have been in overdrive laying eggs lately. I don’t think we’ve ever had this much of a surplus.

Okay, so we really have had this many eggs at one time. But seriously, twelve dozen eggs are currently in our refrigerators. I know part of the reason is that I haven’t been making cakes and this is usually the beginning of busy cake making season, but the other part is with us both working mornings, I don’t make eggs for breakfast as much as I used to when, say, I was unemployed for two years.

The other problem is that a majority of them are covered in poop. Not the easy to scrape off poop from eating chicken feed, mind you, but the difficult to remove stuff from eating nearly everything they get their beaks into while foraging in the yard. My fellow chicken owners know exactly what I’m talking about here. Sure, they could be washed, but then they’d have to be eaten within a couple days as it would also remove the outer protective layer that keeps bacteria away from the inside of the eggs. Think of this layer of film like a sponge; in the plastic wrapper it won’t absorb anything, but remove the wrapper and it soaks in everything. Any bacteria that could be on the outside of the egg will be absorbed and could make a person quite sick. Typically this is why you are more likely to get sick from a store bought egg than a backyard egg since they are all washed nice and pretty before packing. Now, in factory egg’s defense, that film is replaced with an artificial film, but if there was any bacteria on the egg to begin with, it would’ve already been absorbed and could kill you. Okay, so maybe that is a little dramatic. I mean, nobody has ever died from salmonella poisoning, right? Sorry, my tangent-prone mind is on a rampage against big agriculture today apparently.

So, I have options: Give them away, to which there would be many happy recipients at the church who would gladly accept poop covered ovas from our girls; make an excessive amount of egg focused meals for the next couple weeks; boil a bunch up for snacks and egg salad sandwiches; save them for a zombie apocalypse.

Perhaps I need to peruse my cookbooks for recipes like lemon meringue pie or cakes or breads that are heavy on the eggs. Perhaps I need to make a pound cake or an assload of lemon curd and Swiss meringue buttercream. Perhaps I should have thought of this before this morning since I plan on focusing on sewing today after church and exploring nature tomorrow. Oh well.