The first farm egg finally showed up two days ago. Today I had some tamago kake gohan (TKG) for the first time in decades. Raw egg over hot rice – super yummy!

When I was young, we purchased our eggs at a local egg farm. Eventually they closed and we had to buy our eggs at the grocery store. Since you don’t know how fresh your grocery store eggs are, why flirt with salmonella? No more TKG for me. A few years ago, my sister told me about TKG restaurants in Japan. Unfortunately did not visit one but it’s pretty high on my “to-do” list when we visit Japan this year. You can see from the gallery below that TKG can go from humble to fancy with different types of eggs and toppings. My son will be in Japan in a week or two – maybe he’ll visit a TKG restaurant and post some photos on Instagram.

My TKG did not look like the many beautiful photos you can find on Instagram but it tasted phenomenal. I plan to have this for breakfast often in the future.

We have one hen laying eggs. She is an easter egger named Beth, She’s an alpha hen, bad tempered, a bully, and always leading a group of easter eggers and orpingtons to mischief. Beth lays her egg around 9:15 in the morning. I know the time because today I noticed that the usual pack of adventurous roamers was missing her and wondered where she was. She was still in the coop area with the australorps and colombian wyandottes laying her egg. When she was done, she spent a few minutes squawking for her friends.

Her eggs are on the small side but you can see the difference in yolk color from a store-bought egg. We scrambled the very first egg and it tasted much richer and creamier.

Beth pecking my car…

While egg prices are rising, having chickens to save money on buying grocery store eggs is not really a sound strategy. Let’s say we have invested about $1000.00 on a coop, wood, wire, food, watering jugs, feeding containers, treats, bedding mats, shavings, and who knows what else. So the first egg cost us $1000; the second brought the price per egg to $500/egg; today’s egg has brought the price to $333/egg. To get the price to $0.12/egg, I need 8333 eggs. Assuming all ten of my hens are laying eggs every day, I won’t recoup my initial investment for almost two years. Of course during those two years we will have periods where egg production will be reduced (winter) and I’ll still be buying food, about $25 per bag…. Good thing the chickens are amusing. They try to sneak on to the front porch daily and have found all the new grass seed thrown down in the pond area.

Nothing exciting on the koi front. They are still swimming around and eating expensive food in the garage. (I really need to find some creatures that are low cost to maintain.)

The pond builder had to fix our control box the other day. The plug for the pump in the profidrum was fried and the filtration system had stopped running. Thankfully we have extra boxes so he was able to switch it out and can re-do the electrical another day on the bad box. While it was fresh on his mind, he sent a text out to find out if a profi drum we want was in stock in Minnesota. Turns out, the one we want is not in stock. Waiting to hear if a new profi drum can be sent to us within a few weeks for a reasonable price. Always a challenge with the koi pond…

I noticed the first flowers are coming up and it won’t be long until everything is green again. We will be racing the start of spring to get a little more work done in our woods. My attention will then turn to landscaping, the vegetable garden, koi shows and hopefully moving the koi outside. I really do love staying busy.

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