Eggs, Ketchup and My Little Fork

Mar 2010 Issue

By Dave Ellis
Every morning I am awakened by my organic alarm clock. Ah, you think I’ve taken ‘organic’ too far eh? Well it’s really my three year old daughter, Bonnie, who technically is organic, so there: I just saved the earth. Every morning she wakes me by saying “I need food! I want eggs, ketchup and my little fork.” This is not code people, she really wants eggs, ketchup and her little fork. In that order.

I trot down the stairs to start the eggs leaving my wife to sleep in. Yes I’m that considerate, but I mostly do it because scrambled eggs are my specialty. I’m the only one that can make DAD’S FAMOUS EGGS (patent pending). In fact it’s kind of a joke in my family that if mom made them she couldn’t technically call them DAD’S FAMOUS EGGS. She tried it once but the kid’s knew once she received the cease and desist letter from my lawyer.

The key to great eggs is freshness. Most of you are probably OK with store bought
eggs. Rookie mistake. I go to my backyard to get them. No, I don’t live in the back alley of a grocery store (I wish! Day old doughnuts….mmmn.) In my backyard right next to the smell are seven egg laying hens. Yessiree. Seven cluckers that give us five to six eggs a day. Can’t get much fresher than that.

My wife bought the chickens with the intent of adding to our food storage. I voted for a chocolate fountain. At first I was hesitant to have chickens in the backyard. I didn’t want to be one of ‘those’ people that have livestock and have to tread lightly out the back door (yes, they are free range during the day…). I also was worried about the extreme heat of the desert. Have you ever seen a chicken pant? I have.

Luckily we have a pretty decent sized lot to put a coop. Admittedly they are very easy to take care of mostly because they are so stupid. And fast. Once they are confined they only eat, reverse eat (this is a family article) and lay eggs. It’s a pretty simple life that makes me jealous sometimes, except the egg laying part. Plus you can eat them when they run out of eggs! Unless the kids name them. Dagnabbit*. (*I find that I am using more farm terminology since getting chickens. What in tarnation is wrong with that?)

So instead of egg layer/broiler #1 and so forth we instead have: Sammy, Ariel, Kim, Reese’s, Flash, Sandy, and Pinto. They are different colors and we do get some blueish green eggs along with tan and white. I was hoping for some chocolate eggs, but I’ll have to wait until Easter and get them from a bunny I guess.

But the story doesn’t end there. Two weeks ago my wife ordered ten more chicks online.
They are cute! We actually received nineteen total because female chicks are small so they pack male chicks in with them for warmth. So basically all the boys are good for is heat—kind of like people too! Pretty soon we should be seeing a dozen eggs a day and a mine field of ‘gently used’ chicken food in the backyard. Gadzooks!

By the way if you want a baby rooster for ‘cheep’ (sorry) then please email me at dave@desertsaintsmagazine.com. If you want my recipe for DAD’S FAMOUS EGGS it will be on the web site as well.