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
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.