2629. The end of the Egg-Timer

I’m afraid I can’t feel the slightest bit of sympathy for the Egg-Timer, said the Toaster at the emergency meeting called for all the kitchen appliances. She (the Egg-Timer) has sat here on the window ledge for years in a smug manner – in fact Egg-Timers in general have sat smugly in the world’s kitchens for hundreds of years. Three minutes one way, and three minutes the other way.  Like sand in an hourglass so are the days of their lives. Three minutes one way for soft boiled, and an extra three minutes the other way for hard boiled.

I can see why she (the Egg-Timer) feels overworked. Well, I’m going to tell you a secret. It’s been bothering me for some time. I have checked numerable times with the oven clock and I tell you; she (the Egg-Timer) is thirteen seconds short of the three minutes. It’s shocking! An undercooked egg could be hazardous to health.

This is a very good reason not to boil an egg, said the Frying Pan. She (the Egg-Timer) has been poaching my position for years.

I think we should take a vote. All those in favour of ousting the Egg-Timer from the kitchen in place of the timer on the phone, please say Aye.

It appears to be unanimous. Henceforth the Egg-Timer is a thing of the past. Long live the phone! Now for the Salt Pig…

2389. Something to squawk about

(Note: I’m not sure if “Bob’s your uncle” is a universal phrase. It simply means that everything is hunky-dory.)

Maidie kept a few chickens, and each year, since she didn’t have a rooster, she would buy half a dozen fertile eggs off a local farmer. Of course, he gave them to her for free but she always offered to pay.

Having six new chicken a year meant roughly that she had three or four new hens annually and the other two or three to hatch would grow into roosters and be tossed eventually into the pot. Of course, the older hens would get tossed into the pot as well. Maidie lived alone and how many eggs does a live-alone spinster need?

The time had come for her to put six eggs under a clucky hen, but no hen was broody. There was a solution. If she put a few roundish things in the nest at least one of the hens would mistake them for eggs and start sitting on them. The only things to vaguely resembled eggs that Maidie had were some home-grown tomatoes. She placed half a dozen in the nesting box.

Soon a discerning hen was sitting on the tomatoes. But woe! The farmer who supplied the fertile eggs was away on vacation. He wouldn’t be home for several weeks.

Not to worry. The setting of eggs could wait. The tomatoes would continue to render their services.

And then a remarkable thing happened. Before Maidie could say “Bob’s your uncle” the tomatoes hatched; into bright tropical parrots.

If you didn’t know where parrots came from, you do now. Squawk! Squawk!

2153. Crumpet

(For starters – a footnote: apparently not every version of English carries the same insinuations for words and phrases used in this story so things could be relatively meaningless to a goodly number of readers??)

All I did at breakfast was to ask Freda if she wanted toast or crumpet.

“I want crumpet. What do you want?”

She took offence.

By crumpet I meant the cake with a soft, porous texture, made from a yeast mixture cooked on a griddle and eaten toasted and buttered. She took it to infer that by crumpet I meant her to be an object of sexual desire.

“Look,” I said trying to explain. “I was trying to be kind and you took it the wrong way. I wasn’t trying to butter you up.”

“There you go again,” expostulated Freda. “Can’t you treat me as a human being? Covering me in butter and devouring me like some sort of cheap slice.”

“It’s toast then,” I said. “How would you like your eggs done?”

“Oh for goodness sake, I should never have stayed the night. To discuss my ovaries first thing in the morning is beyond belief. I’m leaving. I’m tired of your insinuations.”

She left. The moral of this tale is never have the editor of a dictionary stay over for breakfast.

2013. Don’t count your chickens

Maree was trying to instil into nine-year old Vincent a sense of the value of money. He must learn to work and save and spend. Since they lived on a small life-style block Maree came up with an idea based on their living conditions: if Vincent fed and looked after their poultry she would buy the eggs off him. It was quite simple: Maree and Vincent’s father would continue to buy the feed for the poultry, but the rest was over to Vincent. She would pay him thirty cents an egg. There were only three hens, but with careful saving money over a reasonably short space of time things could build up into a handy little nest egg.

Three eggs a day! Not quite a dollar a day! Almost seven dollars a week! Roughly 27 dollars a month!

For two months Vincent acted as a faithful chicken farmer.

“Have you spent anything of your savings yet?” asked proud Maree.

“Nothing yet,” said Vincent. But he had learnt and done a few things. He had gone to a local poultry farm and they had given him an old rooster.

“Is that crowing I hear coming from the hen house?” asked Maree.

“When there’s no rooster,” said Vincent knowledgeably, “sometimes a hen will start crowing like a rooster.”

After several weeks Vincent started going to the grocery store and buying a carton of eggs. He would sell his mother three eggs a day. In the meantime his three broody hens were sitting on a dozen eggs each!

When his money ran out, Vincent announced that his hens were moulting and not producing eggs, so Maree began to buy eggs from the shop.

Within a few months there were more than thirty hens and roosters scampering around the life-style block.

“What’s all this chicken food I’m having to buy?” asked Vincent’s father.

Within a few weeks more Vincent was able to sell his mother a dozen eggs a day. Not that she needed that many eggs, but she passed some to her sister and some to her mother. Now and again Vincent would get a bonus – five dollars for a freshly killed and plucked rooster.

“Well,” said Vincent’s father to Maree, “I think your little money education plan worked. From now on he can buy his own chicken feed.”

By the age of eleven, Vincent was selling fresh eggs to fifteen different households.

1969. Nesting season

Squaggle Quack was a duck. More particularly, he was a drake. And what a fine drake he was! Mrs. Quack was known as Mrs. Quack, although her closest friends called her Seaxburh. She was named after Queen Seaxburh, an ancient Queen of Wessex. Her maiden name was Hrafnkelsdóttir. Very few know that.

The time had come for Squaggle and Seaxburh to start a family. The first priority was to choose a site for the nest. What a shamozzles! They couldn’t agree. Squaggle wanted the nest in the long grass on the side of a road.

“It’s dangerous,” said Seaxburh. “And there’s absolutely no view. What about on the side of that hill where I can enjoy the view of the valley as I sit on the eggs for four weeks?”

The discussion raged for several days. In the end, Squaggle won. A nest was made on the side of the road, with no view, and open to the elements.

“I think we should have eleven eggs,” suggested Squaggle.

“But I had my heart set on nine eggs,” said Seaxburh. In the end, Squaggle won. Eleven eggs were laid.

Seaxburh began the marathon of sitting on eleven eggs in a cold nest next to the road. It was the most boring thing she had ever done in her life. So uninteresting! So testing! And the rain! You’ve no idea!

In the meantime, Squaggle had flown off at the beginning of the sitting session and never bothered to come back. He’d done his part.

When the eleven ducklings hatched, Seaxburh told them that their family name was Seaxburhsdóttir or Seaxburhssen. Good on you, Seaxburh!

1916. Why don’t you suck eggs?

I paid good money to a tree doctor to have the dead tree cut down and taken away that was disfiguring my garden lawn. And what happened? The idiot cut down the wrong tree. He’s not going to get paid.

“You’re not getting paid,” I told him. “You’ve cut down the wrong tree.”

“You’ll pay me or else,” he said. “I cut down the tree you pointed out.”

“You’re not getting paid, and that’s that,” I said.

“Lady, why don’t you suck eggs?”

Well, that settled that. I’m not going to have a bigoted lumberjack cut down my wrong tree and tell me to suck eggs. Who does he think he is? Does he think he’s Lord Muck of Egypt or what? He can put his chainsaw in his pipe and smoke it.

All that was seven years ago. I still can’t mow my lawn. Sometimes I wish I’d never married him.

1703. Battery hens

Every time Cassandra used an egg when cooking she thanked the hen. She didn’t know the hen personally of course, these were eggs bought at a shop, but in her heart she thanked the hen that had gone to all the trouble of laying it.

It was possible that this hen was locked in a cage, a battery hen, with no chance to wander freely and scratch about at will with the cavorting cockerel.

Cassandra could have bought eggs where the carton stated: CAGE-FREE EGGS or FREE-RANGE EGGS. But she thought, what about the caged chickens locked forever living in a hell-hole to produce for her, Cassandra, the beauty and satisfaction of an egg? It was her way of saying thank you. Thank you Mother Hen for all your sacrifice, for all your effort. How sad for you to live a battered battery life with no hope, no love, no consolation. It was almost as if those who bought FREE-RANGE EGGS didn’t care about the plight of those poor chickens locked away.

It was the same for Cassandra when she wanted to roast a chicken. She always purchased the ones that did NOT say FREE-RANGE. It was her way of showing she cared.

1542. Things are not what they seem

From the outside it looked just like an ordinary egg. It had been laid by an ordinary chicken in an ordinary farmyard. The mother hen (apparently) was an ordinary Rhode Island Red. The father (apparently) was a rather handsome silver-laced Wyandotte.

Twelve year old Gilbert knew his breeds of chickens. He’d looked after the chickens for his mother and father almost since he was a toddler. These days he kept just the right balance between it being a hobby and it supplying the house with not too many and not too few eggs. Gilbert liked to have different breeds of chickens, and he’d cross one breed with another to see what sort of combination emerged from the egg. But… such an interesting genetic mix-up was exactly what the aliens were looking for. They had been watching the farmhouse for a month or so. They knew the way young Gilbert managed his chickens.

One night, when the next day they knew Gilbert was going to put a clutch of eggs under a broody hen, the aliens injected one of the eggs with very specific genetic material. This would change the history of the world. In fact, this would end the history of the world.

Before school the next morning, Gilbert took the eggs he had been saving that were laid by the Rhode Island Red hen in liaison with the silver-laced Wyandotte rooster. He selected twelve eggs. Of the fourteen eggs that Gilbert had collected only two remained. Fourteen eggs were too many for the broody hen to keep warm. Twelve was just right. Of the two unchosen eggs, one contained the alien genetic material. The watching aliens were distraught.

Then Gilbert did something he always did: at the last minute he swapped the eggs. “This,” he thought, as he replaced one of the dozen eggs with the rejected alien egg, “will produce a different chicken from the one I first selected!”

Gilbert always did that. It was if he was playing God. Except, in this case he was.

1284. Knut’s penguins

Knut pestered his mother.

You know, Mom, how people have chickens and collect their eggs? Well I want to have penguins instead.

You can’t have penguins, Knut. They need a huge expanse of sea to swim and catch fish.

But they have penguins at the Aquarium Center. They live there permanently.

That’s because they artificially create the right environment for them.

We could do that. It’s not as if we’re not filthy rich.

We’re not doing that, Knut.

I WANT SOME PENGUINS!

Well you can’t. And that’s that.

Knut was really annoyed. He stomped out to feed his pet giraffe.

1279. Brown eggs

Una and Rory had been married for fifty-two years. For fifty-two years Rory had devoured a boiled egg for breakfast. One egg and a slice of toast. Una made it for him every morning.

Rory was a little fussy; the egg had to be dark brown. Brown eggs were healthy. White eggs were feeble and lacked vitamins and health. A daily dark brown egg it had to be. Brown eggs came from healthy, robust chickens.

“It’s the brown eggs what done it,” said Rory on his eightieth birthday. Which just goes to show that Una’s secret of boiling a white egg in tea was good for the health.