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).
Migraine aura picture from 
Eggs produced by chickens tended by children! What could be better? I love watching the segments on Gorden Ramsey’s show with his 4 little kids and their London backyard animals (first turkeys, then pigs).
Do you have a separate freezer? If not, it might be worth considering one if you can find a good spot. Used freezers are usually less expensive, though I found that buying a new one assured I got a more energy efficient model and the size I wanted. I think it was around $350-400 and is about 3/4 the size of a fridge (I bought an upright because I am the type who would lose or forget stuff in a chest style freezer). I organize the contents on the shelves with plastic crates and bins (they act like drawers) to make the most of the space. With a separate freezer, you can buy larger quantities of meat/poultry, perhaps quarterly or three times a year (less often than that and you might have freezerburn or lose flavor). I found that the freezer didn’t raise my electric bill sustantially and the savings of buying in bulk is worth it.
It takes a while to get used to thinking seasonally and so far ahead for meat and poultry production, but the nice thing is that once you get used to it, it drastically cuts down on your shopping (which for you, without a car, would probably be a big bonus as meat is also heavy to carry and must stay chilled for freshness). Sometimes people with smaller families share an order, too. I also find that it increases my cooking creativity, because I have to dig into my meat cookbooks for ideas on how to cook unfamiliar cuts (right now I am trying to figure out what an O-bone roast is and how to cook it). With advance orders, many places can custom cut or package for smaller/larger families, save special bits that others don’t want (organs, oxtail, chicken feet for broth), etc.
There are networks for locating pasture based farmers (www.eatwild.com & http://www.localharvest.org are two examples) and I know that there are some great pasture-based farms in the northeast. Whether they deliver or not I don’t know. But if at least one of you has a driving license, it might be worth a day’s car rental to have a mini-holiday going out to a farm somewhere in a 2 or 3 state perimeter to pick up an order.
When I was visiting my family in Upstate NY last summer, I took my son and nieces with me to visit and buy meat for our 4th of July BBQ from Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Schoharie Valley, southwest of Schenectady/Albany, NY (owned by the parents of Shannon Hayes - she’s the author of Grassfed Gourmet & Farmer and the Grill cookbooks that I use so much). Turns out my dad has known them for years. My dad came along with us, too, and told the kids how Scholarie Valley was the “breadbasket of the Revolution” because it was such a fertile farming zone and such a crucial resource for the Patriot army, with fantastic soil from frequent floods of the Schoharie Creek. Then we went to Howe’s Caverns, a kitschy blast-from-the-past, and a great cool place to get out of the summer heat. It was a great day and far more fun than going to the local Price Chopper supermarket.
I can get local meat, poultry, eggs, and seasonal goat milk here in So Cal, but it mostly isn’t pasture based. Land is so expensive here, as well as water. My local source is working on increasing the amount of pasture the animals are on, but their hobby farm is a work in progress; I can live with that. So. California is very green right now because of the winter rains, but March-Dec we hardly get any rain at all. So right now I make a compromise of local “with a face” winning out over distant pastured food with mail order delivery. I looked into buying from farms up in the Central Valley of CA but that means a very long drive through the LA region, which isn’t my favorite way to spend entire day.
Looking forward to learning more your “know your farmer” experiences.
Comment by Anna — January 22, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
wait - no picture? i want a picture of these little cuties.
Comment by deborah — January 22, 2008 @ 6:29 pm