Nifty Gifty

I love little gifts, and I especially love little gifts that are consumable and won’t clutter up my house for years to come.

My husband came home with just such a gift last night – a half dozen pretty, tiny, freshly laid eggs.  They are about the size of ping pong balls and the color that my mother’s old-fashioned crocheted doily patterns used to call ecru.  Well, sort of.  The color varies slightly from egg to egg.  Having grown up in upstate New York, I’m used to pure white egg shells.  And having lived in New England for nearly 11 years, I’m also used to egg shells the color of cafe au lait.  But these super pale brown ones are just too pretty for words.

We are city people and, on principle, do not own a car, so transacting directly with farms is difficult for us.  (Thus do two of my basic principles of sustainability clash!)  We belong to a CSA where the farmer specializes in delivering produce to urban neighborhoods; this takes care of our vegetables during the short New England growing seasion, 5 to 6 months per year.  I plan to investigate a raw milk CSA that claims to have a dropoff point in our town.  But meat and eggs have eluded me, thus far, so I do the best I can in the grocery store.  I believe some of the local farmers’ markets have meat producers, and I will look into that when spring comes.  I have not yet seen eggs at the farmers’ markets that are conveniently located, though.

So where did my husband find these gems?  A colleague of his lives in a tiny town in New Hampshire, and his three kids are raising hens!  My sweetheart bought these eggs for me, for us, for 20 cents each, proceeds to go to the kids to cover chickenfeed.  This pleases me – “know your farmer” is a kind of mantra for the locally raised food movement, and I am sure these kids are treating their hens humanely.  I know what the hens eat – commercial chickenfeed in the winter, less than ideal, but they forage whenever the ground is not covered in snow.

Extra bonus – tonight I have a nice grassfed steak queued up, so I think we’re having steak and teensy tiny little eggs for dinner, with our usual two veggie side dishes (maybe a giant green salad and something cooked).