COOKING With the Backyard Poultry Flock

Although you’ve probably been cooking meat and eggs for years, there are a few challenges when preparing meat and eggs you’ve grown yourself. There are seasonal challenges, as you’re buried in eggs during the spring months, wondering what to do with them. And you will find yourself with meat that most people today have never cooked, such as stew hens and heritage turkeys. I’ll never forget the time we grilled an 8-month-old rooster, a cooking process that made it as tough as leather. Such a sad waste of a good chicken. Since those days, I’ve been collecting cookbooks published prior to the 1970s in an attempt to relearn cooking skills long forgotten. Assuming you haven’t started your old cookbook collection yet, here are a few recipes to get you started.

Eggs

You can eat eggs laid by any type of poultry, but because chicken eggs are the most common, the recipes here assume that you will be using chicken eggs from standard-sized chickens. If you are using bantam chicken eggs, you’ll need to double the number of eggs in the recipe. Turkey and duck eggs are almost twice as big as regular chicken eggs, and a goose egg weighs as much as three chicken eggs.

Although chickens will lay for about nine months