I’m in a Facebook cooking group and they do a theme challenge each month. April is Depression Era or Frugal. So I decided to go as cheap and gourmet as possible. Soldiers and eggs with dead nettle pesto.
Homemade: bread, butter Home raised: goose eggs Home foraged: pecans, dead nettles, wild garlic
I made a soft skin and a hard skin loaf because my wife likes a softer crust.
Paid for: Salt, pepper, EVOO, flour, yeast, heavy cream. Cost per person: $1.13
How’d you get the eggs so cheap?!
I have chickens, ducks and geese. Eggs are practically free. Especially the goose eggs. Once the goslings are feathered out they can live exclusively off grass with zero supplemental feed. But they only lay in the spring, three times a week, and you may have to fight a goose to get the egg once it’s laid. But as a reward you get one egg the size of three chicken eggs with one yolk that is equal to one and a half full sized chicken eggs.
The rest of the year the geese just protect the flock from hawks and mow the yard.
Such an apt description of a goose
Needs more violence to be accurate
Ah true. I assumed there’d be violence since it’s geese lol
Chicken Eggs are practically free after you spend hundreds on a coop.
My first egg cost $600. I designed and built the coop to be mobile, durable and protective in a way that traditional chicken tractors aren’t. But in the years that have passed the infrastructure has held up. Two square bails every three months. Feed is paid for by the few eggs we sell. It takes a load of upfront investment but it can pay off. If we shrunk the flock just to our needs then we probably wouldn’t even need to buy feed because the acre would be enough to support them by foraging. We could make our own straw from rogue grass that gets four feet tall.
Return on investment might be pretty good right now though 🤷♂️
It definitely is. I’ve been tipping people in eggs.
I’m so thankful I have friends and parents with chickens… they have more than they can deal with. They’re not even that expensive at the store, but I refuse to buy cage eggs (let em fuckin wander, my GAWD)
The yolks from pet chickens are so much fuckin bigger and more orange also. So much better.
Which is about 10 eggs v in USA?
But in return you get chicken friends, and after 6 months, you get eggs too.
Retail bottom tier eggs are currently $5 a dozen. A little bit more than the cheapest cigarettes. They are my wife’s friends. I’m the one that gets attacked by geese.
Chickens only lay for 2-3 years. So after 3 you have chickens to take care of for the next 10 years and no eggs. Or kill them for food. Which is hard to do when you’ve been caring for them.
Friends!!
the meat off of hens that have stopped laying is also mostly only good for soup, since it’s pretty tough meat that said, it’s not that hard to kill them for food since you’re not exactly cuddling with them or even that close to them often like with companion pets
Bought a goose.