Locally laid

This week I’m eating eggs from my neighbors’ back yard chickens. “The girls,” they call them. Six hens, who live in a simple henhouse behind the vegetable garden in this suburban neighborhood. Each lays one egg a day. The household that owns these “girls” totals three people, now that one of the children is off at college; the mama says there’s only so much quiche you can make.

So I happily accepted a dozen eggs, and my friends made me feel as though I were doing them a favor.

Quite the opposite.

These eggs were so big the egg carton wouldn’t close. They made the brightest, yellowest quiche that’s ever come out of my oven. Fried up in a pan, they had nice, firm yolks and flavor to spare. A real treat.

Besides which, I love eating locally, and unless these chickens were in my own back yard, I couldn’t get more local than this. Local eating, as most of my readers know, saves the environment from the gazillions of gallons of gas used to cart food across the country, and it preserves the freshness and therefore the nutritional value of the food. It supports the local economy.

I also believe in free-range chickens: It can’t be a good thing to eat eggs from an animal that has been crowded into a tiny cage and/or de-beaked to prevent it from frantically pecking its fellow prisoners in a desperate bid for more space. I don’t go in for the over-the-top graphic descriptions of animal cruelty peddled by PETA and others, but I have made a conscious decision to buy only from farmers who take good care of their animals.

And there are plenty. Like the farmers who sell at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market and other local outdoor venues. And the farmers at Weathertop Farm, in southwestern Virginia. I’ve visited Weathertop, and was thoroughly charmed by their birds, who move in a wave of feathers and self-important clucking, all together as if somehow attached to one another, their little voices rising in a chorus of curiosity when you approach their fence. They are real animals, living real lives, and their eggs are really tasty.

Even when I can’t get super-local, super-fresh eggs, I look for free-range in the stores. But beware: free range doesn’t always mean what I see at Weathertop and in the backyard around the corner. Case in point: a couple of years ago I called Wild Harvest, the purveyor for Shoppers Food Warehouse that supplies so many of their organic products – including eggs from “cage free” hens.

This has got to be a huge company, if they supply Shoppers, an enormous grocery store chain in the metropolitan D.C. area; I didn’t really expect much of an answer to my query about how well they treat their animals. So I was surprised when, a few weeks after leaving a message at Wild Harvest, I got a phone call from a farmer ready to describe to me how he raised his chickens—the ones that lay the eggs I buy at Shopper’s.

I wish now that I could remember exactly what it was he said, but I do remember that it was unequivocally inadequate. Each chicken, I believe he said, was given a full square foot of space in a group cage.

That didn’t sound like much to me.

In the real world, the one where you’re rushed to grab a dozen eggs because the kids are having friends over for breakfast, the one where you’re at the grocery store buying dog food and you can’t see making another stop at the co-op, the one where you’re really trying to save money and buying not-so-free-range eggs at 50 cents cheaper a dozen won’t change the world if I do it just this once, in that world, I occasionally buy the one-foot-by-one-foot-per-chicken “free”range eggs.

But not this week. This week I have these gorgeous backyard gems.

Here’s my quiche recipe, flexible for whatever fillings you might have on hand. The night I made it, I used broccoli from the farmer’s market, but my favorite thing is spinach. Or onions. Lots of them.

Ginny’s Quiche

One pie crust – preferably homemade (see previous recipes)
Half cup or more (to taste) grated cheese – your choice, but I like swiss or gruyere
Three (really) free-range eggs, with enough milk poured on top to equal 1-1/2 cups
(use half and half or cream if you’re feeling decadent or if you need to put on some pounds)
1 to 1-1/2 cups vegetable filling: steamed broccoli, lightly sautéed spinach or other greens, or onions
cooked in butter for 20 minutes or so, until super soft and sweet
Salt and pepper to taste

Spread cheese in the bottom of the pie crust. Add vegetable filling, spreading it around evenly.
Whisk eggs and milk together. The rule is: for every egg, fill the measuring cup with milk to meet the ½ cup mark – hence, three eggs, fill it to the cup-and-a-half mark. If that seems skimpy once you get it into the pie pan, add another egg-and-milk-to-reach-1/2-cup.

Bake at 375 for 20 to 35 minutes, until the middle doesn’t jiggle anymore.