Dear Chickens. Thank you for all of your hard work. Thank you for the countless breakfast omelets, cookies, and other deliciousness your eggs have provided to our family. You guys are the greatest. 

Happy Weekend Everyone!

The day before Easter Peggy snapped a few candid shots around the farm that I wanted to share with you. She saw a bunny, baby lambs, and of course eggs. It certainly must be spring around here! Too bad as you can see, we still have snow accompanying our "spring". 

Hopefully these snowy pictures will soon be replaced by gorgeous photos of spring time lavender. Have a wonderful weekend and think spring!

We love having chickens on our farm. Sure, we love the delicious fresh eggs they bear us, but there are so many other reasons we love having these birds around. 

The most economically compelling reason to keep chickens is to recycle food waste. This composts it into a wonderful organic soil builder for your garden as well. The more kitchen waste you feed your chickens, the more nitrogen rich fertilizer they will give you to compost with. 

Hand in hand with that is their natural digging, pecking, and scratching abilities. This helps you to create top notch gardening beds. You can grow more produce in a smaller space, which means less water - which should be important to us all. 

Chickens also love to eat all of those nasty protein packet insects in your yard. This is awesome for you because maybe it will save you from a tick bite or two, but it will also protect your precious garden as well. They also love to eat most weeds, making your work load much lighter. 

And my favorite reason? Chickens are loveable pets. Increase your stress lowering hormones and form a relationship with these useful and happy birds. Some chickens are even bred as therapy birds. We find the most happiness in caring for our chickens, just getting outside with them each day and exchanging food for eggs and giving them a hello is enough to make all of us smile. 

Have an egg-stra special day!

My husband loves when we have breakfast for dinner. Its probably because he is usually so rushed in the morning, a bagel and a banana is all he ever has time for. There is just something so satisfying about hash browns, bacon, eggs. It just warms the soul. Well today's recipe is a fun little twist on a traditional breakfast dish. It was a nice way to make "breakfast" even more special when served at dinner time. 

The trick here is very simple, you make your hash browns in your waffle maker! I loved this idea because hash browns can actually be pretty tricky. Mine always seem to stick to my pan, they burn easily, and never are crunchy enough for me. Well using the waffle iron was so simple and they turned out beautifully!

Ingredients: (Serves 2) 

4 potatoes 

2 eggs

6 slices of bacon

fresh parsley as garnish

salt and pepper

 First, peel and grate your potatoes in a cheese grater. Use the smallest grate side for crispier hash browns. Once grated, use a towel or paper towels and squeeze out all the excess moisture from your potatoes. You may have to squeeze out the moisture several times until they feel dry. Add some salt and pepper to your potatoes. You could add garlic salt, onion salt, tyme, parsley, whatever herbs or spices you like to use in your hash browns. Spray your waffle maker with cooking oil. Place your hash browns on your waffle iron and press down. Depending on how hot your waffle maker gets, and how crispy you like your hash browns, cooking time here can take 8-10 minutes. While this is crisping up, cook your bacon on medium heat in a frying pan until nice and crisp. Set the bacon out to dry on some paper towels, then chop into bite sized pieces. Fry an egg sunny side up until the white is set and the yoke is still runny. 

Once all your components are ready, simply assemble them on top of one another. 

This is a lovely crispy dish. Nice and salty from the bacon with a fun crispy crunch from the bacon. The runny egg yolk just takes everything over the top. Yum yum. Hope you enjoy this playful take on breakfast!