Happy Easter Eggs

I like to think that we have happy hens.  They get to be outside.  They are able to peck and scratch, chase and eat all sorts of insect life, bask in the sun, dust bath, do just about all the things that a wild chicken would be able to do.  So if they are happy hens, they must lay happy eggs.  

When you buy a carton of eggs from the store and open it up, those eggs all look pretty similar.  They have been graded according to size, and any 'inferior' eggs have not been included.  They might be considered inferior only because of their colour.  Our hens lay brown eggs, but there are lots of variety in the definition of brown.  Some are quite dark, and some have lots of speckles on them.  Others are much lighter, and right now we are getting some that are so pale they could almost be considered white. 

I looked in a carton of eggs at one of the large chain grocery stores.  They were 'free run' eggs, which means they are from hens that are loose in a barn, but they are not outside.  Every one of those eggs was a very deep brown colour, with lots of speckles on it, and they were all exactly the same colour.  I'll admit that I had to wonder if they were dyed, as we never get eggs like that.

We do get eggs in all shapes and sizes though.  There is the occasional tiny one, the size of a pigeon egg.  Well not that I am really familiar with a pigeon egg, but you get the idea!  Eggs that size have no yolk in them, I call them cholesterol free.  We get the occasional double yolker, which can be the size of duck eggs.  This is more frequent when the hens are just starting to lay, and their body hasn't quite got things figured out properly yet. 

Some times we get a wrinkled egg.  They almost look a bit shrivelled. 

We get the occasional egg that has no shell, just a thick membrane around it.

It's Easter Sunday, maybe today the hens will lay chocolate eggs!