Chicken and Egg - Janice Cole [5]
I wish I could tell you that I decided to take the next year and travel the world, taking cooking classes on every continent. Or that I came into a windfall and bought a house in South America. Luckily my husband still had a good job, but we had two sons in college. I didn’t have the option of doing something wild and extravagant and expensive. Still, I needed to make this change mean something. As I settled into my new/old role, I began thinking…about chickens!
My idea of raising chickens began a long time ago, almost as a joke. This was well before the current backyard chicken craze hit the country.
“I want chickens,” I announced one day while my husband, Marty, was watching television. “Huh!” he mumbled. I went on to explain about how cute it would be to have a few chickens running around the backyard. “Um,” he replied. I left it at that. A lot of our major decisions have similar beginnings.
Looking back, I’m not sure how serious I was when I first raised the idea of chickens. At the time, I still had a full-time job, the boys were living at home, and our lives were busy, verging on chaotic. But my chicken fantasy soon gained a life of its own. I became like the landowner in Woody Allen’s movie Love and Death who carried a piece of turf in his pocket announcing to everyone “Someday I’m going to build on this land.” Someday I was going to have chickens.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I began fancying chickens, but it may have been immediately after my first taste of free-range organic eggs from the farmers’ market. As a former restaurant chef, I’ve had my share of incredible food experiences. But those simply prepared eggs, only hours old, from chickens that had run in the sun and eaten natural food, was truly mind altering.
I still remember coming home from our local farmers’ market and showing my two sons the beautiful green, tan, and dark-brown eggs I had purchased. It was lunchtime, and I boiled a few of the eggs and made simple egg-salad sandwiches spread with shallots and homemade mayonnaise. The eggs were difficult to peel because of their freshness, but the taste was like nothing I had ever had. The vivid-yellow yolks turned the mixture into a golden glow. We all happily chomped on our sandwiches, licking the egg salad that was dripping down our chins. And there was almost no sound as the three of us sat, mesmerized by the taste. When my younger son begged, “More, please,” I knew I simply had to find a way to have my own eggs.
Six months after I started working from home, I began earnestly talking about raising chickens. “You’re crazy,” my husband said when he realized I might actually be getting serious. “We can’t have a farm here; we live in the suburbs of St. Paul. It’s the Twin Cities; we’re urban.” I assured him I didn’t want a farm, just a couple of chickens. I pictured cute chicks, picturesque chicken coops, and indescribably delicious eggs. My husband imagined smelly farm animals, hard work, and mountains of chicken poop.
Friends often loved the idea at first, but quickly became squeamish. “You cook for a living!” they’d exclaim. “You’re not a vegetarian, you cook chickens!” Then they would ask me accusingly, “How can you raise them in your backyard?”
I explained that I didn’t intend to eat my chickens. “Besides,” I said, “farmers do it all the time.” “That’s different,” they muttered.
Was it?
Our yard is a fine place for chickens. It’s bigger than a city lot, although quite cozy for a suburban yard—a mixture of grass, lots of bushes and trees for chickens to hide under, and wild growth in the back to romp in. There were no neighbors in the lot out back. It was owned by a cemetery but unoccupied. Whoever