Spot the difference?

Since Agnes died, I don't think I have mentioned the hens on the blog. I can see them now from my study window scratching around in Chicken World, fully feathered, bright red wattles and combs, and every inch the little dinosaurs that they are, scratching around looking for tidbits. Mice, frogs and toads have been given fair warning, stray inside the perimeter at your own risk.

Mine are very spoiled chickens, and to my surprise are still laying 3 - 4 eggs a day at the moment, which when you only have 5 hens, is a good average I think for this time of year.  Over the summer I have finished planting a small orchard for them to wander around, in a small nod to their original habitat as forest floor birds. They have areas of shade and cover, along with areas to sunbathe and dust bath, and cover from the rain in what gets refereed to as the 'bus shelter'. They are fed a varied diet of layers pellets, mixed corn, greens and the occasional strawberry, which they devour with relish. Meal worms are a favourite treat too.

The eggs are a source of endless fascination, and until I had my own hens, I had no idea how variable eggs could be.  We have eggs with shells so thin that any attempt to pick them up sees them shatter into a gooey mess all over your hand. Eggs with no shells at all. Eggs so warped and wonderful, you could really imagine they had been laid by some ancient extinct creature. Some are so small that you would not think me a liar if I told you a quail laid it, others so vast, that a goose would be proud of such an offering.

Typically, the eggs my girls lay would class as large or very large if being graded for the supermarkets, with the occasional dark brown medium one thrown in for good measure.  When I see an egg that looks unusually large, I weigh it; and the record so far was 89 grams. That is until one of the girls laid the monster in the box above. It is so large it wont fit in the egg carton, it dwarfs the other eggs. It is so large that it completely fills my hand, and I am not able to get my fingers to meet around its girth. It is a monster.

In Guinness Book of Record terms it is  still a puny example, the record for the largest there is 180 grams, but even so my contender rocked in at a healthy 105 grams! I suspect it has multiple yolks, I am hoping for at least 2, although chicken eggs with as many as 5 yolks have been recorded.

Such an egg deserves to be consumed in a special dish though and I am still deciding how best to cook it. I welcome your suggestions.