From Slugs to Soufflé

We ate dinner on the deck last night - it was one of those perfect spring nights around here, cool and crisp. The worst of the pollen blast was over and the deck had been swept and the bugs aren't yet out. The deck is prime chicken-watching territory, and they were busy turning over the earth in their run, since I'd just cleaned it up that morning, adding lots of compost-in-the-making, full of worms.

If you haven't spent time watching chickens (and who would, unless you had some!?), they're more amusing than one initially suspects. And they love to scratch around their yard, kicking up a veritable dirt, leaf, bedding, worm, bug storm in the process. I was laughing over all the worms they must have been finding that evening and my son said something about getting "wormy eggs" in the morning.

"Well, that's better than the time you fed them 25 slugs in one day," I responded, "those were some sluggy eggs!"

"From slugs to soufflé!" he quipped right back. "It was 35 slugs, actually."

I laughed, hard. It's funny and gross, and it makes you think.

The pleasure in opening the egg-door of the coop and finding eggs doesn't go down, no matter how many times we do it. They are not affectionate pets (in fact, they're a bunch of chickens, squawking madly every time I startle them, which isn't hard to do!).

They are not too bright (bird-brains, some might say), but they are entertaining and reliable.  They have their pecking order...nobody is too terribly hen-pecked though...we've learned about nest eggs and brooding, and those terms all have a new richness to them.  The only downside?  I've gotten rather cavalier about the occasional dropped egg in the kitchen because there's more where that one came from (although we try not to count our chickens before they hatch, right?).