errantember

My puggle Louie has been looking unusually healthy recently. The reason?

Fresh chicken eggs. Lots of them.

I've been free-ranging the chickens in the yard for the past few weeks, and although it's great in every other way, they have unfortunately gotten into the habit of laying eggs in the yard. I've managed to eat precisely *one* of these eggs.

Louie has probably eaten about five. Maybe more. Who knows? We haven't seen an egg for ourselves in about a week.

So, for the time being, the chickens are being confined to quarters to enable the creation of human-destined eggs. A week long phone-tag exchange finally resulted in the original owner of two of the chickens getting his egg boxes into Austin where I could pick them up. Unfortunately, it also was where someone *else* could pick them up, which, evidently, they did.

Back to Square One.

So far I'm pretty impressed with The New Best Recipe. I've cooked four items, with the following results:

Panna Cotta with Berry Coulis - Everybody liked it but one anti-gelatin person, and one person said it was "the best dessert she'd ever had."

Roasted Squash - This didn't turn out as well. It was tasty, but a little dry and clearly not up to the standard of the book. The recipe was fairly simple, and the oven temperature was monitored, so I think the failing was probably the fact that the kind of squash I used isn't mentioned in the book. In the section on squashes, they explicitly mention that different types of squash require different techniques. The culprit was Early White Bush Scallop.

Braised Cabbage - Totally out-of-this-world fantastic! Much better than I thought cooked cabbage could be. A simple recipe with butter, chicken broth, salt, pepper, thyme and parsley. Good thing I liked it, because I stuffed myself comatose on 1/4 of a basketball-sized cabbage I got at the Austin Farmer's Market on Wednesday.

Scrambled Eggs - Light-years better than the way I usually cook them, and ready in about five minutes or less.