Since taking a few chances and stepping outside of the “normal” way of life it seems I have become incredibly lucky and all sorts of strange and lovely things are happening. Actually I think you make your own luck and if you can slow yourself down and keep your mind open brilliant things will present themselves to you when you would otherwise have been too busy and preoccupied to take your chances or even to notice them.

After an sequence of such random ‘chance’ events Andy and I were asked if we would like to look after a beautiful farmhouse in Devon, with a pony and 8 chickens to look after. It was a difficult decision (erm not really!), but after some thought we finally agreed and here we are.

I really hope to have a few chickens myself at some point in the future so this was a great opportunity to see what it would be like.

We arrived to find the chicken barn containing 7 eggs which we were very excited about. Later found a whole bowl full in the fridge. What are two people going to do with 30 eggs?! I am needing some inspiration for egg recipes. So far I’ve made scrambled eggs. Woo! How exciting. I think I need some help. Any suggestions would be gratefully received. I’m thinking quiche, never made that, or souffle, never made that either. I’ve heard both can be pretty tricky. I have a vague recollection that I once tried to make quiche and somewhere along the baking of it the pastry kind of moved from being on the bottom of the eggs to kind of laying across the top. No idea how that happened, so any advice on how to avoid this would be great.

Incidentally the chickens they have here are those rescue chickens you can get from the nasty intensive chicken farms when it is decided they are too old and unproductive to be worth keeping alive and would be otherwise have been killed. I’ve seen these at another place when they’d just arrived, with half their feathers pecked off, these ones had been here a while and were looking pretty healthy by now and were happily laying eggs in the barn and will do for several more years.