We found our first chicken eggs this morning! Yea! I'm so excited. And its exactly 4 months from the day we brought them home from the feed store, which was May 7. One was cracked out in the wood pile so we're not sure when that one was laid but the other two were right in the nesting boxes, perfectly clean in a bed of wood shavings. These eggs are smaller than normal, which is typical for adolescent birds when they first start to lay. They should get bigger over the next several days and weeks. The second and third pictures show them in comparison to a typical large store egg. Notice how bright orange the yolk is of our egg as compared to the store egg which is from higher levels of vitamin A from eating green grass and bugs. Also notice how firm the white is which means it is very fresh. Woohoo! We should start getting 6-7 eggs a day since we have 7 hens and one rooster (at least as far as we can tell thus far).
After returning from visiting my in-laws last night with fresh tomatoes and basil from my mother-in-laws garden (thanks Grandma!) I was really hankering some caprese salad. There was only one problem--no mozzarella. I happen to have checked out a book from the library called Home Cheese Making by Ricki Caroll (in preparation for when we get our dairy cow--hopefully next year) which had a recipe for 30 minute mozzarella. We decided to try it out for our afternoon science experiment and it was a success! It really did only take about a half an hour and tastes better than store bought anyway. It used a gallon of milk to make a pound of cheese and you need some rennet and citric acid (which I had already as I've been experimenting with homemade dairy products for awhile.) and a thermometer. Here are some of the photos of the process. I used a gallon of whole milk this time to give myself the best chance of success. It also says you can make it with powdered milk by adding some cream so that's what I'm going to try next time. That would be a great way to use up some of that food storage (since I'm certainly not going to drink the stuff :-) )
