Tag Archives: eggs

End of the Egg Crisis

12 Replies
Christmas Stamps

Christmas Stamps

The Egg Crisis has passed. After giving it some thought I tried again. We’d put six in the fridge still in their shells and five of them ended up being fit to use. They are currently in the fridge pickling away, along with some others that I boiled and shelled with no problem. I had intended doing half with chilli and half with plain vinegar, but I put the crushed chillies in at the beginning and, as usual, the first lot of vinegar lasted for two jars. Note to self – next time do the plain ones first then add crushed chilli. Unless I decide chilli is the way to go. I’m quite keen on adding crushed chillis to pickled onions as it does liven them up – not to sure about pickled eggs but will find out soon.

Another note to self – when boiling chilli flakes in vinegar don’t breathe the steam. It took about half an hour for me to stop coughing. and an hour before my eyes stopped watering.  The annoying thing is that I know better – I just forgot.

Anyway, the good news is that our stock of hard-boiled eggs is down to manageable levels. A vegetarian kedgeree and some egg sandwiches should see them off by Christmas.

Christmas Chutney

Julia went shopping with my sister yesterday, picking up the food orders from M&S – just a few vegetarian bits and a cheeseboard. We have far too much cheese. However, it will keep for New Year. I’m having vegetarian roast for Christmas Dinner, Julia and Number One Son will have turkey. Number One Son’s Partner, who will become Number One Daughter in Law next spring (I really could do with some shorter aliases for people) will have a choice. I hope she has the veggie option so there will be plenty of turkey left for sandwiches as I intend having turkey sandwiches several times over the holidays.

The week between Christmas and New Year is my favourite week of the year – the week where I have turkey sandwiches most days and can be idle without feeling guilty. OK, there’s a bit of cooking and washing up to do but not much else. And yes, I can actually idle most of my year away without feeling guilty, as Julia has just pointed out. – I’m lucky that way. I lack the gene which makes Julia jump up and down doing things when she should be relaxing. However, in this particular week it’s even easier to feel relaxed about idling.

I just lostthe entire post but managed to get a lot of it back. I still have about 350 words missing but will see if |I can get them back later. Julia is back from the cafe, the kettle is on and Christmas is about to start.

Have a good one. I will try to pop back later and find the rest of the words.

Pom-pom Christmas Wreath

Four Days Later

8 Replies

Where does the time go? My good intentions simply cannot cope with the power of procrastination and melt away when exposed to reality – as effective as the proverbial chocolate teapot.

Big news of the day is that after due legal process in the USA, despite the courts being stuffed with presidential nominees, the Epstein Files were published. And all the useful bits had been redacted. Words like mockery and farce come to mind.

Quiche

That’s my concession to the serious news in the outside world. Future readers take note – I do realise there is other news about, I just don’t bother with it. Our big news is the hard-boiled eggs disaster. We boiled 16 eggs to make pickled eggs (two jars of six, plus four as back-ups. It was a bit last minute because I’d been putting it off, and when we started on the eggs they peeled badly and were unusable.

Older eggs are supposed to peel better than fresh eggs but these were old, and they peeeled badly. It may be that they were too old, as I haven’t been baking much recently.

We just had an egg mayonnaise sandwich for lunch and I am thinking about what to do with the others. You can keep them in the fridge for a week, but that still  means eating a lot of hard-boiled eggs over the next seven days. Eggs, I like. But I like them scrambled or in an omelette, or, as often happens, a cross between the two. I really don’t relish the idea of a relentless succession of eggs that are all cooked the same way.

At the moment we don’t have any suitable fish, so it looks like we might be having vegetarian kedgeree, egg salad and more sandwiches in the run up to Christmas.

We normally have snacks on Christmas Eve to get us in the holiday mood. Could it be sandwiches?

(I suggested hard-boiled egg quiche but Julia vetoed the idea.)

More Quiche

Photos are all badly lit examples of how to eat eggs. 🙂

 

The Parsnip Lottery

11 Replies

As I was writing this last night, the shopping arrived. there seems to be a worldwide parsnip shortage. Most weeks they seem to be out of stock. This is getting far too much like the episode of Foyle’s War where they had the onion raffle. At least in the war we had an excuse – most of our onions, even in 1939, were imported. Some of them were even imported by French farmers using onion sellers on bikes. Somehow this has become enshrined in British memory, even though I have never seen one. I’ve also seen the onion shortage put down to a lack of Dutch imports, but can’t find a reference to this. Another source cites the Channel Islands, Bermuda and Spain. That last link is very good, with some interesting details about onions in the early part of the war.

The problem is that it has been very wet here. This is bad for many vegetables, including potatoes, carrots and potatoes. There are reasonable international sources of potatoes and carrots but most of our parsnip imports come from Spain. Guess what? They are short of parsnips in Spain because it is too dry. I was tempted use capitals and an exclamation mark there, but have decided against it. They hope that the Spanish main crop, due any time now, will alleviate the problem.

Carrot, Parsnip and Swede Soup

Meanwhile, aggravating my supply problem (as in my problem with surpluses rather than shortages) is the fact that I opened a tin of tomatoes by accident last night. I thought they were mushy peas (I was having Omega 3 fish fingers again). In a slight daze, caused by a washing up frenzy, I reached out and picked up the wrong tin.

It’s going to be tomato soup for lunch. I was planning on not having soup until tomorrow, when it was going to be roasted vegetable soup using leftover roast veg from the lot I will be doing tonight. Soup for lunch means I won’t be having eggs as planned, meaning I am now building up a surplus of eggs. With hindsight, I should have bought a pastry case instead of a quiche. I’ve never been good at making my own pastry, and with arthritic fingers   I now do not need to feel guilty about buying it in.

TESCO – Top Valley, Nottingham. A shop with no Parsnips.

Word, words, words…

15 Replies

I’ve just been doing my online grocery shop. We didn’t have a delivery lasy week as we were trying to use up some of the stuff we still have. You can soon build up a surplus if you order the minimum amount each week. We have, for instance, five peppers, which is more than enough for the coming week. That’s what happens when you order automatically each week and don’t plan your menus properly.

I noticed something new on the ASDA site today – plant-based coleslaw. Now, I know I’m not well up on modern terminology, but plant-based coleslaw”? It’s made, as I recall, from cabbage and carrots and mayonnaise. There are probably more complicated versions, but when I can be bothered to make it, that’s how I do it. Cabbage and carrot make up 95% of the recipe. I use spring onions, apples and sultanas depending on what is to hand. They, last time I looked, were all plants or from plants. You could eat it with bacon and there would still be enough plants in there to justify the description “plant-based”.

As with so many modern expressions, they are using it to cover something else up. In this case, I presume they have taken the eggs out but calling it “vegan” doesn’t portray a particularly cheery image. And “we are happy to use small foreign children as slave labour but don’t want to be cruel to British chickens” doesn’t quite have the right tone either.

So, as ever, we bend the language to the point of being inaccurate, and almost meaningless, in the pursuit of marketing. And marketing, as we all know, is not much different to lying, apart from a better defined career path. If you lie outside the marketing industry you may well become Prime Minister, as we have seen recently, but there are no guarantees.

For the featured photo I have used a picture of plant-based wheat.

Panic-Buyer!

39 Replies

Yes, I finally cracked. After checking our food supplies yesterday, and seeing we were deficient in fresh vegetables, we decided to go out and look for the things we needed.

Did we actually need to do it? Probably not. Is it panic-buying? I don’t know.

However, we haven’t exactly been out stripping shelves in the last few weeks and, as Julia exercises indoors, we have been taking isolation seriously. I, of course, take my exercise by walking from TV to kettle, and back. I think we can allow ourselves a shopping trip.

We drove past ALDI on the way to the vegetable shop and noted that they had a security man on the door but no queue. We parked there and, while Julia went round the corner, clutching a list of vegetables, I went into ALDI. I felt like a child at Christmas.

There was just so much stuff in display, including bread, milk, long-life milk and eggs. What a difference two weeks makes. A fortnight ago it wouldn’t have meant anything. It would merely have been what you expected. Today, I could feel tears at the back of my eyes. Briefly. I’m not normally an emotional man, but the sight of all that sliced bread had a powerful effect on me.

If that happens after a couple of weeks, I wonder what I’d have done after six years of wartime rationing. I’d probably have made a proposal of marriage to a sliced wholemeal loaf.

I did the shopping for a whole week, seeing as it was there. I also bought a few extra bits, including an extra bag of potatoes, two litres of long-life milk, and a bag of pasta as a bit extra. I can rationalise it as protecting us from other people and their panic buying, though it’s also, to be honest, panic buying in its own right.

I’m not sure whether to feel happy or guilty. This feeling was reinforced when a flurry of snow hit us in the car park.

Meanwhile, on the TV news I saw this report.

I’ll give you a quote from it: ‘To all the people in this great city of ours in Derby, if you have gone out and panic bought like a lot of you have and stacked up your houses with unnecessary items you don’t normally buy or you have bought in more food than you need, then you need to take a good look at yourself.’

I can, with my hand on my heart, tell you that haven’t thrown a single scrap of food away in the last three weeks.

In a week or two I will be making Woolton Pie. If I can get flour it will have a crust. If not, it will have to have a mashed potato top.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Clivia – a family heirloom

The end photograph is our clivia. I’ve always called it a Natal Lily, but it might not be, as it looks like a different cultivar. We have had it for about 30 years, since my mother passed it on to Julia. Two days ago we managed to knock it over, so it’s looking a bit worse for wear.

In the 30 years we have passed several on, having grown them from root division. It needs to be under cover, which is a shame, because it’s a lovely plant, and would look good in the garden. You can grow agapanthus, red hot pokers and mesambryanthemums outside in the UK – it’s a shame we can’t grow clivia. The garden next door used to have a fine show of agapanthus, but the last owner buried them under their new drive.

Breakfast at Sainsbury’s (Scone Chronicles XXVII)

9 Replies

I’m going to have to up my work rate after what I said in the last post. This is therefore going to be the first of two posts today.

We have not had a good time at Sainsbury’s at Arnold recently. Twice before Christmas we went in and ordered Beef Baguettes. The first time we tried, we were told there there were no baguettes. I pointed out that they had a shop full of baguettes. It seems that they aren’t allowed to use them.

The second time it was a lack of beef that interfered with the plan. We had festive toasties instead, which allegedly contained turkey and stuffing, but tasted of cotton wool and ketchup.

When we found that the place was crowded at 11.30 I nearly didn’t bother stopping, but I’d promised Julia a day out, which, in my view, means that she doesn’t have to make breakfast.

The cafe was full, many of the tables for four being monopolised by a solitary coffin dodger who was on first name terms with the staff. Say what you like about quality of a service (and I will cover that fully in a later paragraph) , they know how to treat the elderly and I may well move in when I’m a few years older.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Tea – note the cup for a milk jug

i got a table for two while Julia ordered the food. It needed clearing and wiping down. So did many of the others. A member of kitchen staff emerged at one point, cleared the pots off one table, left the crumbs and went back into the kitchen, never to be seen again.

One lady went as far as to get the table wiping equipment from the staff and wipe her own table down, also wiping the table for a lady in a wheelchair. To be fair, we are supposed to take our own pots away, and it must add more work when people are too lazy, or too arrogant, to clear the table after eating. On the other hand the staff should keep the place clean – I’m paying enough and should have a clean place to eat.

When Julia arrived with the tea I noted the milk was in a coffee cup, rather than a receptacle designed for pouring milk. Again, we paid enough for them to provide a small jug.

It’s just minor details, but it’s annoying that people can’t get the simple things right. For an echo of these thoughts seethis post, though I note there are one or two typos in it – sorry for that.

The food arrived quite quickly, and a member of staff took it on a tour of the cafe before finding us, so we were never in danger of burning our mouths.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Big Breakfast – Sainsbury’s, Arnold

The breakfast report –

Portion size – good

Sausages – excellent and herby

Hash Browns – crispy and delicious

Beans – average, after all opening a can and heating beans is not a skilled job

Mushroom – excellent

Toast – average, another unskilled job that is difficult to do badly

Eggs – borderline – a hint of snottiness to the white means they were slightly undercooked

Bacon – this could take some time. There is a division of opinion on whether bacon should be crispy or pink and juicy. I favour pink and juicy myself but if the cook does it crispy I’ll eat that too. However, I’m not aware that there is a school of thought that says bacon should be cooked until hard, tied in a knot and basted with grease before being dumped on the plate. If there is such a school of thought I can recommend the cook at Sainbury’s in Arnold.

The bacon actually looks quite nice in the photo. But trust me, it wasn’t. And it was salty too.

So, despite the lack of cleanliness, mediocre efficiency and patchy breakfast, how was it?

Pretty good, to be honest. The good bits of the breakfast were very good, the staff are always friendly and cheerful, even if they do get behind with the cleaning and, judgingh by the way they get on with their regular ancient customers, they are providing a valuable community service.

I suspect the staff are great and the management is poor.

Would I recommend it despite my sarcasm and criticism?

Yes, though its constant failings with cleaning and detail are a bit wearing. On a good day it’s probably the best local breakfast, but the good days are, at the moment, in a minority.

Book Review – The Most Perfect Thing

6 Replies

The Most Perfect Thing

by Tim Birkhead

Bloomsbury (2016)

Hardback 220 pp  £18.99

ISBN-10: 1632863693

ISBN-13:978-1632863690

I started reading the book and was instantly taken back to my days producing hatching eggs. Though I’d worked part-time while I was at school, I’d only reared chicks and worked in a hatchery. When I started full time they found me a job on a breeding farm run by a manager who had started working with poultry in the 1930s and had been a lecturer at agricultural college.

While the book taught me about eggs I was drifting back in a parallel world where I was a teenager again, being taught the same things for the first time. I was surprised by how it all came back.

There was also a lot in the book that I didn’t know, which was interesting and wide-ranging, but also possibly one of the faults – in a few places I felt it did get a bit lecturing. It didn’t stop the flow of reading, or detract much from the enjoyment, but it did jar slightly.

Despite this it was easy reading, so I was educated, informed and entertained at the same time and could, if time had allowed, have read it all in one sitting.

I’m happy to recommend it to bird watchers and general readers, with just one proviso – it’s very good, but it doesn’t strike me as the sort of book I could love. There’s just something a little cold in the tone. But that could just be me – don’t let it put you off.

 

Medecine, mistakes and a misapprehension

12 Replies

On the grounds of good taste I’m not going to go into detail about what happened at hospital this afternoon.

The facilities are good, the staff were cheerful and I was only away from home for 45 minutes (we can see the hospital from our house so travel doesn’t take long). Despite this I’m not very happy with the experience.

It’s hard to feel satisfaction when you go in for tests and come out without having the tests done.

The NHS did not cover itself in glory today.

However, my day was better than the man who was waiting with me. He  was under the misapprehension that they were going to put the camera down his throat.

 

Today’s photographs are just a few selected from thousands…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Quercus Community with cake and mince tarts
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Enjoying winter sun at the Ecocentre

 

 

A yolk about eggs

5 Replies

We collected the eggs today, not that there were many, as we’ve sent most of the hens to market and it’s the wrong time of year. (Of course, from a chicken’s point of view, it’s always the wrong time of year to go to market).

In fact there were two eggs, and being from bantams, they were both small. One was much smaller than the other. On Monday I weighed three of these eggs and they weighed just over 90 grams, which isn’t much more than one decent egg. In fact I used all three of them in place of the one required for the Grantham Gingerbread.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

This put me in mind of a limerick, (which I altered to match the circumstances).

 

There was a young hen from Devizes,

Whose eggs were two different sizes.

One was so small,

it was no use at all,

But the other won several prizes.

 

 

Incubator Diaries (Part 7)

4 Replies

This is the final report.

We hatched seven chicks from fifteen eggs and, although I’m very pleased with the seven chicks that hatched,  I’m not very happy about the overall result.

Of the eight that didn’t hatch, three (the two brown eggs and one bantam egg) were infertile. The brown egg layers are all old birds, which might be a factor, but they share a cockerel with the hen that laid the green eggs (all three of them hatched) and were collected clean and fresh so I had expected better.

The other five were all  bantam eggs and come from just one hen. The infertile egg may well have been caused by the fact we had to store the eggs for two weeks to get enough to hatch. I should have marked that laying dates on the eggs so I could check the correlation with hatchability.

The ones that didn’t hatch were a mixture of mid to late term fatalities and were rather black inside.

Looking at all the possible causes I think we can ignore temperature, humidity, power failure and poor turning as they are all taken care of automatically (though I will test the temperature next time I set it up to check the accuracy of the built-in thermometer). They are on a good ration so I’m going to ignore poor nutrition for now.

That leaves inbreeding, poor ventilation, diseased or infected eggs and lethal genes.

I know what a lethal gene is, but I haven’t a clue how it would show itself.

I can’t vouch for ventilation – I will probably ventilate more in the next attempt and see what happens.

However, as the weight loss from evaporation was what we expected I’m assuming that humidity  and ventilation were about right.

In truth, I can’t remember the parentage of the breeding stock, as they were passed on to us without much detail. The  bird that laid and hatched the clutches of 11 and 8 on top of the coop is a half sister to the bird that laid these eggs but the “half” may make a difference.

That leaves diseased/infected eggs, which was my fear from the beginning. Our nest boxes aren’t brilliant so there is often dirt on the shells, which can allow germs into the egg via pores in the shell. That, plus the length of time we had to keep the eggs, is probably the cause.

I’m going to do some calculations now and see what I can do to improve.