I’m in a Facebook cooking group and they do a theme challenge each month. April is Depression Era or Frugal. So I decided to go as cheap and gourmet as possible. Soldiers and eggs with dead nettle pesto.
Homemade: bread, butter Home raised: goose eggs Home foraged: pecans, dead nettles, wild garlic
I made a soft skin and a hard skin loaf because my wife likes a softer crust.
Paid for: Salt, pepper, EVOO, flour, yeast, heavy cream. Cost per person: $1.13
There are people still using Facebook? I was completely unaware. MySpace still a thing too?
Thank you for your invaluable contribution. I hope you find the peace that eludes you.
Thank you. I love you too.
Pesto needs a lot more oil but otherwise looks fantastic
It was a balance issue. The wild garlic was mild and the dead nettle was pretty neutral. The pecans were more texture than flavor. If I put in any more oil all you were going to taste was the oil.
any Italian ever when someone says there’s too much oil:
Don’t get me wrong. I love missing good oil.
How’d you get the eggs so cheap?!
I have chickens, ducks and geese. Eggs are practically free. Especially the goose eggs. Once the goslings are feathered out they can live exclusively off grass with zero supplemental feed. But they only lay in the spring, three times a week, and you may have to fight a goose to get the egg once it’s laid. But as a reward you get one egg the size of three chicken eggs with one yolk that is equal to one and a half full sized chicken eggs.
The rest of the year the geese just protect the flock from hawks and mow the yard.
protect the flock from hawks and mow the yard
Such an apt description of a goose
Needs more violence to be accurate
Ah true. I assumed there’d be violence since it’s geese lol
Chicken Eggs are practically free after you spend hundreds on a coop.
My first egg cost $600. I designed and built the coop to be mobile, durable and protective in a way that traditional chicken tractors aren’t. But in the years that have passed the infrastructure has held up. Two square bails every three months. Feed is paid for by the few eggs we sell. It takes a load of upfront investment but it can pay off. If we shrunk the flock just to our needs then we probably wouldn’t even need to buy feed because the acre would be enough to support them by foraging. We could make our own straw from rogue grass that gets four feet tall.
Return on investment might be pretty good right now though 🤷♂️
It definitely is. I’ve been tipping people in eggs.
Which is about 10 eggs v in USA?
But in return you get chicken friends, and after 6 months, you get eggs too.
Chickens only lay for 2-3 years. So after 3 you have chickens to take care of for the next 10 years and no eggs. Or kill them for food. Which is hard to do when you’ve been caring for them.
the meat off of hens that have stopped laying is also mostly only good for soup, since it’s pretty tough meat that said, it’s not that hard to kill them for food since you’re not exactly cuddling with them or even that close to them often like with companion pets
Friends!!
Retail bottom tier eggs are currently $5 a dozen. A little bit more than the cheapest cigarettes. They are my wife’s friends. I’m the one that gets attacked by geese.
I’m so thankful I have friends and parents with chickens… they have more than they can deal with. They’re not even that expensive at the store, but I refuse to buy cage eggs (let em fuckin wander, my GAWD)
The yolks from pet chickens are so much fuckin bigger and more orange also. So much better.
Bought a goose.
That looks amazing!
I try to cook things you can’t get in any restaurant at any price. But my plating needs work.
I think it looks lovely. Good idea with the nettle pesto, going to try that this weekend!
Last year I didn’t get any because my geese ate all of the dead nettles in the yard. Fortunately I put up some fencing around my raised beds which keeps chickens out but also takes the volunteer dead nettles.
I just realized that we’re talking about two different nettles. I looked up yours, I didn’t know you could eat those! I will have to try it. I’m talking about stinging nettles. They are just coming up at home, next weekend will be perfect for harvesting. I like to steam them, then form them into logs on a baking sheet and freeze them. Save the steaming water for stock too.
Stinging nettles are edible too!
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/165071/stinging-nettle-soup/
Yeah, that’s the ones I was talking about! I freeze em so I have dark greens through the winter. Apparently the steaming water is great for your hair too.
We get no stinging nettles here. But dead nettles are so much easier to work with, so we have that going for us.
Yeah, that’s a true fact. They always seem to find a small hole in my gloves.
