Eggs!

We go through a lot of eggs at our house, between just eating them for breakfast to cooking and baking.  We're fortunate to have a connection for reasonably priced pastured chickens, lamb & cows, and now we have a connection for eggs.  It's one of those things that you try not to think about where they come from because you know that the chickens who lay most store-bought eggs are treated terribly.  We've bought from friends who have chickens but we don't see them often enough to keep us in the amount of eggs we use.  Just a few block away, though, is a small Mexican restaurant where they sell eggs.  The owner's uncle has chickens, pastured, that he houses in the winter with heat lamps.  The restaurant carries them all year.  She said that she gets about 10 dozen a week to sell.  We put in a standing order for 2 dozen eggs a week.   Yes, these eggs come at a premium price (but not too much more than store bought), but when I cracked some beauties open to make chocolate chip cookies, their yolks were a deep, dark, lovely yellow.   The eggs themselves are beautiful, with green, bluish, brown, cream and white eggs in the container.  They are so gorgeous that, probably around March next year, I'll start blowing them out to save shells for decorating an egg tree.