Local Food: The Winter Edition

I'm interrupting the handmade parade with breaking news from the kitchen department.

Here's a pop of color and flavor we've been enjoying with our winter meals. I started lacto-fermenting some dill carrots and pink sauerkraut late in the fall. Carrots from the garden, green and red cabbage from the farmer's market. I consulted this book a bit. Mostly I just made it up, with ingredient inspiration from the products of local Leelanau Cultured Veggies. I'll be making more, to be sure!

Even more exciting, all four chickens are now laying.

Apparently it would be normal for them to slow down their production in the darkest part of the year rather than ramping up, but my chickens are newbies. Nobody told them, I guess. I'm loving this beautiful egg spread!

Here's the whole egg spectrum, in order from first layer to last:

 Penny, Pippi, Petunia, Polly

Penny (Rhode Island Red)

Penny was the first to lay in early November. Her eggs are rounded in shape and a very smooth, shiny, uniform brown. And, though she's been laying longest, hers are still the smallest of the group.

Pippi (Araucana)

Pippi joined the fun near the end of November with her lovely, large, pale green eggs. Aside from their color, another excellent trait of Pippi's eggs is that, when hard-boiled, they're easier to peel than any of the others. Unfortunately, I haven't had much success capturing the color with the camera.

Petunia (Silver-Laced Wyandotte)

Petunia was the next recruit on the roster of Team Egg. Her eggs, which first showed up in mid-December, are lighter brown than Penny's, longer and pointier, and have small white speckles all over them.

Polly (Barred Rock)

Polly finally stepped up in just the past week. Her eggs can be hard to tell from Penny's, but in a side-by-side comparison, you can see they're a little bigger, a little lighter in color, and a little less uniform in their coloring (with tiny speckles that are much less prominent than Petunia's).

Remember how I said "breaking news" at the beginning of this post? Well, none of this is actually hot off the press. We've been enjoying fermented carrots and cabbage for several weeks, and I've been collecting even Polly's eggs for a few days now. But right after I took all these egg photos and then put the carton away, I opened the refrigerator again, pulled out the cheese drawer, somehow caught the egg carton that was beneath it, and the next thing I knew, seven eggs had crashed to the floor. One was intact. The dogs each got to lap one up. And the other four I managed to salvage. We had an omelet for dinner.