Skip to main content

Stroud Eggs


Today I went to Stroud on business.

I asked Chris about farm shops. We went to one but it was shut at one and we were too late.

But there was an egg place down the road.

This is the first time I have seen an egg factory.

It is free range. it was quite nice. They had many eggs in a shed and a scrap of paper with prices on and a tray to leave your money in.

It was £2.40 for 30 eggs which seems quite good to me.

here is apicture of the eggs and below is a picture of the shed where they are collected. The chickens lay in cages to the left and right and the eggs roll out into collecting trays. Then i presume people go along and put the eggs into trays. On the other side of the cage is the exit so the hens can go outside and run around the pen where they can scratch about for food and such.

We saw that too. They had quite a lot of space. Its on a sort of plateau in the Cotswolds with old-fashioned dry stone walls around the fields.

I liked it until the farm dog came up hysterically barking at us and we had to go.

It was very interesting to see how the eggs are collected. I guess a lot of egg places have that kind of system.

The eggs I bought were huge. They were too large for the recycled Waitrose Large Eggs box that I put the eggs in.

Haven't tried them yet - will let you know if they taste as good as one feels they ought to.


The last pic shows how the hens come out the back of the shed and go into the outdoors. There was a bunch of hens further away in a bigger area with grass so I guess they get turns in the bigger part and most of the time they get to hang out in this bit. And then go inside again at night. This is what 'free range' means on egg packets. Now you know!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Squirrel Nut Stew

Spent a weekend in the woods and collected a few mushies plus some fresh squirrel! I've also had a bumper crop of sweet chestnuts and walnuts from trees down the road. So i had a superb stew made largely from wild local food, apart from the flour (Waitrose farm in Hampshire), thyme (Dennis' allottment), salt (Maldon's, Essex), oil (olive but local rapeseed would be perfectly good substitute. I just happen to have a five gallon bottle of olive oil that was given so am making good use of it!) and carrots (Abel & Cole). Here is my recipe for squirrel stew, incorporating Tristram's suggestions about the first stage for the meat: Preparation stage: 1 squirrel, skiined and prepared ( see Flickr for details of how to do this) A few ounces of flour with salt and thyme mixed in Oil For the stew 1 or more penny buns (cep mushroom) A few spiny puffballs Handful of Amethyst Deceivers Handful of sweet chestnuts , peeled Handful of walnuts Water 6 medium size Chopped carrots Sp

Amethyst Deceiver!

The little purple one was the edible and rather delicious Amethyst Deceiver . The River Cottage handbook claims that they are generic, "filler" mushrooms. I don't agree. They are a bit tough and chewy but that was a good thing. I spent ages poring over these little lilac beauties thinking they might be Lilac Fibrecaps, in which case a very nasty dose of pretty much everything was in store. They are called Deceivers because they have a near relative that is edible but takes on a thousand forms, making it very tricky to recognise. Happily the story ends well with me having a nice purple treat and a full tummy. The one in the background was Charcoal buirner ( Russula cyanoxantha ) or simliar, but it turned out to be full of little mushroom grubs. All the other mushies we brought home were poisonous - or couldn't be identified but were similar to known poisonous ones.

Spot the Bugs

Sometimes bugs are spotted: I liked these ones.