The pursuit of the perfect egg has taken us many places. They have to have really deep-orange yolks, or they just won’t do. For a while, we even had our own back-yard chickens, but their food attracted rats. And they kept getting into the vegetable garden. But Stephanie has cultivated a new source, and today we took advantage of a perfect late spring day to re-up, as well as take the dogs for a walk along the river nearby. On the way, I spotted this Olds Omega, a former CC that I only saw once in town. Now here it is in the country watching the grass grow (literally).
I’ve done a post on the Hentze’s family farm before; but back then it was walnuts, before eggs were added to their crops. The chickens live under the most majestic sycamore (plane) tree ever, and keep this old Mercury Topaz company.
Wouldn’t you want to buy eggs from someone who drives a Topaz and keeps her chickens right next door to the house? Good thing too, as the strong smell of skunk was leftover from an attack on the chickens last night, which required Gordon Hentze to interrupt his slumber at 2:30 in the morning for an intervention that included his rifle.
More:
I can’t say that I’m all that picky about eggs, but any reason to go on a car spotting excursion is good. 🙂
CC effect: I saw a nearly mint looking Tempo this morning. Most of them left around here are total beaters by this point.
Springtime in the Willamette Valley always comes as a great relief from the doldrums of the winter months….Beautiful old farm!
Never owned a Tempo/Topaz, but I have killed a couple skunks in the chicken coop before. Used a .22 on the first one, which didn’t kill it fast enough. Took months for the odor to dissipate. The second infiltrator got a 12 gauge game load round – no spray.
I hope that Omega doesn’t regularly get parked so close to the road — too easy to get hit that way.
We call February around here (central VA) “skunk month.” Seems to be peak time for them crossing the road and getting flattened. Even if you straddle the carcass, the stink remains in the car for quite some time. So far, I’ve lucked out my not killing one and getting a mess on one of my tires. Squirrels are another matter.
“The pursuit of the perfect egg has taken us many places. They have to have really deep-orange yolks, or they just won’t do.”
People that don’t know, don’t know..
I have an Egg guy just outside Polo, Il and a backup near Clinton, Ia. I prefer “double bubble” yolks over color but either way “farm fresh” is the best.
My Grandma had a 77 Skylark in that same color. She gave it to me around 1995 when she quit driving, it was so rusty it wasn’t funny. Front subframe pulling away from the body rusty.
sycamore = plane tree.
Always learning something new at CC.
So, Paul, what ride did you take on such a fine day? Perhaps the owner of the ’36 Plymouth gave you the keys and a picnic was packed?
That would have been very nice on such a sublime day as this. We took the TSX, just…because. And it does have a sunroof.
sycamore is not a plane tree. They are related, but not the same.
Same genus; different species.
It is hard to see the chickens clearly, but there does seem to be an assortment of breeds. I usually buy brown eggs at the grocery store. I grew up on a farm/ranch. Mom had a few hundred chickens.
I have found lately, around here (Portland OR) the brown eggs you can buy are bland and really no different from white eggs
I find that the brown eggs seem to have slightly better shells than the lowest priced eggs and so keep a bit longer, not that you want to keep them too long. How good the eggs are depends on what the chickens are getting for feed and are they free range. Chickens kept indoors in cages are probably going to produce the least tasty eggs.
I like to buy eggs at the local farmers’ market on Saturdays, but they tend to sell out early and I am not an early riser on the weekend. So I more often than not end up getting ones at the grocery store. I buy cage-free brown eggs, which taste pretty good, but for some reason the ones I’ve been getting lately have maddeningly thin shells. Makes it hard to get a good break without shell fragmentation…
Nice photos and I would like to visit that farm someday. Least those Chickens have the common sense to stay off the car, not all of them do. Sometimes the Woodchucks would get so bad back home my folks would keep a loaded .22 Gauge and earmuffs handy so as soon as they woke up and they could see Woodchucks by the sunlight they could blast them away.
From my days of living in the countryside I have been startled real good by some oddly parked vehicles or trailers in my travels. Rural Mail Carriers do not like their route to the mailbox impeded from personal experience.
“Rural Mail Carriers do not like their route to the mailbox impeded from personal experience.”
Ideally they should be able to drive up to the letterbox, poke your mail in, and drive off without reversing. Certainly without getting out of the car. When you spend most of your working day delivering mail, each awkward delivery makes a difference.
Too funny. Just this very past weekend I bought and tried for the very first time, quail eggs. Tiny, but that little yoke has intense flavor. Like sean posted, those who don’t know, don’t know. I have had farm fresh duck eggs also; they too are killer. Simply amazing how bland and tasteless normal supermarket chicken eggs are, due to how they are processed.
really? how are they “processed”?
You know what they feed chickens to darken the yolk? Marigold oil. It is added to commercial chicken feed precisely for this purpose. Yes, marigold oil comes from marigold flowers. You know why dark yolks are important? Because noodle and pasta producers will pay more for dark yolks because it imparts a darker color to their product without the requirement of listing “artificial colors” in their ingredients list.
for a regular guy just buying eggs to eat in his own kitchen, dark yolks are pointless and a foolish way to shop for eggs.
That’s the way commercial egg producers make them dark. The natural way comes from chickens free-ranging, and finding some of their own food. As long-time egg connoisseurs, I can assure you that the taste of eggs various very substantially based on what they eat. Marigold oil alone doesn’t cut it. These eggs are the best, right up there with the best ones out back yard chickens used to lay, and neither of them ever had marigold oil.
Stephanie kept buying all the best “free-range” eggs in the stores, but none of them came close to what these are, at least not on a consistent basis.
Commercial egg producers with large (thousands or 10’s of thousands) can’t really let the chickens run free and still find the eggs. Also by the time eggs get to your local store, they are probably more than a week old.
If you’re boiling eggs, you actually want them older.
I will tend to disagree with John. There is a major difference in both the texture, and flavor in eggs. Depending on what they are from, and what they ate growing up. You either like eggs, or think they are all the same. Which they are not. At least around here in the Pacific Northwest. Can’t speak for other region’s.
Had a friend that raised chickens for a while, the best eggs I ever tasted. The shells were green or brown, depending on chicken. He also raised a couple of pigs, and it really was the best pork I ever tasted. I had my trailer parked in his yard for a few months, one of the chickens “adopted” me and would flutter over the fence to greet me. And she would come over every morning and leave me an egg on the step for breakfast. Agree supermarket eggs and pork taste like garbage compared to home raised pigs and free ranging chickens.
Same for beef and lamb. We butchered a year+ old lamb we raised strictly on pasture a couple years ago Christmas Eve – was the best tasting meat (hogget). Working through our first heifer right now, with another on pasture that will go in the freezer next Spring sometime. The flavor and texture are quite different from the mealy stuff you get at the store.
Probably Araucana’s, but the color may be blue-green.
Cousin Gary west of Ames buys his eggs from the lady down the road; likes them cause they taste good and have green shells. That way when he serves pork we can say we are eating Green Eggs and Ham. Lady was only charging people what it cost her to feed and house her chickens, she was only selling the eggs to get rid of the excess-her chickens were her hobby-but Gary and the neighbors felt guilty for experiencing so much pleasure on the cheap, they got together and made her raise her price to match the white ones in the store. Iowa Nice.
Pullet eggs always had darker yolks, I always thought the reason was developmental, but now I wonder-they scatched around outside until they were old enough to lay regularly, and then we cooped them up and fed them corn, oats and protein supplement (“chicken mash”). Never thought of the natural dyes in the bugs and worms.
a chicken lady that drives that car doesn’t charge enough for her eggs
“Dead Skunk in the middle of the road, roll up the windows and hold your nose.”
http://www.songlyrics.com/loudon-wainwright-iii/dead-skunk-lyrics/
I like that Olds .
Farm Fresh ~ it’s been a long time .
We usta bury an old cast iron bathtub on coals , drop a pig into it and shovel dirt over the top ~ took hours to cook but the best Pork you ever had .
-Nate
Anyone else think of Pink Flamingos after hearing “Egg Lady”?