February 13, 2012

Eggs - How to Boil an Egg - Pickled Eggs - Survival Homestead - SHTF - Raising Chickens


Egg salad is boiled eggs, onions, parsley, carrot and/or celery and pickles cut into small bits and mayo mixed with a teaspoon of dry mustard and salt and pepper to taste served with lettuce on bread as a sandwich. 

To boil eggs will a pot half full with cold water put it on the burner.  Add eggs to fill the pot, put on a tight lid and turn the burner on high.  Once the water is boiling turn it off, leaving the pot on the burner.   

After about 3  minutes, carefully drain the hot water from the pot.  Put the pot in the sink on the faucet to pour cold water on them to cool them down. 
   
If the egg isn’t cooled fast enough the yolk edge will darken, this does not however affect its edibility.  Peel an egg by tapping the bottom and top to crack the shell, peel and rinse.  
Pickled Eggs
 

Usually, this time of year, we have eaten all the dill pickles and pickled hot peppers.  Since I use excellent organic apple cider vinegar for these and hated to throw it out when the pickles were gone.  This vinegar is excellent to add to soups and salads.  But we really keep the jars of vinegar in the fridge to pickle our eggs. 
Bring the eggs to the boil and cool.  Peel the egg trying to keep the egg attractive with the yolk inside.  

My eggs are so super that the yolks are huge making this almost impossible.  I am sure I could pickle them, but they make the vinegar clouding and unappealing, so I make egg salad with the duds.

Well enough bragging back to the pickled eggs. . . 

Peel them and fill the pickle jars with as many as you can, without packing them so tightly the vinegar can't engulf all the eggs.  We love the spicy hot pepper eggs out of hand.  The dill pickle eggs are excellent in salads, especially potato salad.  Could it be any simpler?
Never reuse the vinegar after eggs!
 
  It is unbelievably easy to raise chickens and have fresh eggs everyday. 

You could say if you had ten hens you could expect five eggs per day. A red dot on the yolk is natural if you have a rooster.  A green tinge to the yolk is also natural if the hens have eaten a lot of greens.   

Washing eggs destroys the natural bacteria boundary that makes eggs safe to eat and these should be consumer right away.  You can tell how fresh a cooked egg is by the size of the air pocket space.  The larger the space the older the egg and the easier it is to peel.  (So how old your store bought eggs are!)
 
Feed chickens a mixture of following in their feed dish:  kitchen/garden scraps, wheat, oats, rolled corn, apple cider vinegar, yoghurt, molasses, kelp, nettles, egg shells, oatmeal, dried peas, lentils, flaxseed, hemp seed, brewer’s yeast, mustard seed, broccoli seed, radish seed, millet, sunflower seeds, cooked egg, dill, chia seed, amaranth seed, kale, some weeds and most weed seeds, green tea and sprouted grain.  They also like worms, bugs and fish.  Do not feed birds potato peelings, coffee, meat fat, rice and uncooked egg shells from unknown source.

About these eggs:   The smallest one is a large from the store, the medium one is an average size for my girls, and the largest one turned out to be a triple yolker!

For more details on raising chickens on this blog 
use the search engine at the right!

Peace

7 comments:

  1. I've always wanted to try making pickled eggs. Thanks for the inspiration and directions :)

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  2. That's quite a list of things to do with eggs. We always find that our eggs are quite a bit larger than the large eggs at the store too!

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  3. Glad to return the favor Mrs. Mac. Welcome Laura aren't "our eggs" the best! peace

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  4. Found your blog through a search for canada homestead! I'm looking for others trying to live off the land in Canada ~ getting back to basics. Wondering if you know of some more Canadian blogs? I follow yours now (so I don't lose it) and look forward to clicking on more of your blog posts :)
    www.cariboogals.blogspot.com

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  5. sorry I don't Jo - but the blogs on the left are all excellent for getting skills - i think you are the nearest to me geographically person to me - off to see your blog now, peace

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  6. we are probably only a few hours apart, is what i meant to say, most comments come from Americans - peace

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  7. Actually I have blogged on how to boil an egg - to get it perfectly just hard but not too hard. http://caroleschatter.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/how-to-boil-egg.html

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