It was, predictably enough given ours is a foodie household, an impressive achievement to lay siege to the mountain of food that was laid on over the Christmas New Year period. In the smallish kitchen of our house, and using two fridges, one chest freezer, a hooded barbeque and a dodgy oven, we prepared, shared and consumed food over a series of feasts that lasted three days.
It included lobster on Christmas Eve, turkeys – two of them – with all the trimmings on Christmas Day and a groaning table of salads, meats and platters for Boxing Day. In three days I cooked for, fed, entertained and cleaned up after 45 people. It was exhilarating.
On the fourth day I retired to my bed with a good book and sipped weak tea.
On the fifth day I started my month-long light diet, beginning, as it so often does, with a little help from Gert.
Gert is an ISA hen, who happily wanders through the Blue Mountains garden of my friend J, with her sisters Alice B, Mad Sylvia and Storm. J assiduously avoids spraying the garden with any pesticides, keeps her dopey staffy who is completely clueless about chook etiquette away from the ladies and provides a five-star chicken coop in which they can roost. J’s reward is two to three eggs a day that are peerless in their freshness and taste. Her Christmas gift to me was a carton of a dozen jewels, all less than five days old.
I knew they were less than five days old because J had gently written in pencil the name of the chook who laid the egg and the date it was gathered on each egg shell. It was comforting to see eggs of different sizes, some still with bits of straw stuck to the sides.
My pared-back diet is one based on simplicity rather than calorie control. It’s not that I intend to lose weight; rather, I aim to give my digestive system a welcome holiday from the demands of sauces, oils, bulk and stodge.
And so it was that I sat down to a breakfast of a three-minute googy egg supplied by Gert with some sourdough soldiers and a pinch of sea salt. The yolk was an astonishing fresh buttercup yellow and the taste was enough to make me close my eyes and savour each mouthful.
In Australia there are more free-range eggs sold than are actually laid – consumers who want free-range and fresh can’t always trust the probity of the eggs and supply has yet to catch up with demand. In the same week I received my care-package I bought a dozen free-range eggs at top dollar, only to narrowly avoid adding one rotten egg to a mayonnaise.
With so many people now taking the time to tend a vegetable patch in their backyards, perhaps a few chooks scratching next to the compost heap isn’t such an alternative idea any more. Certainly my local council recognises the trend and now offers workshops in raising happy chooks (and presumably in keeping happy neighbourly relations by not allowing roosters in suburban backyards) and my local hardware mega-barn offers classes in DIY chicken coops. You can even hire a couple of chooks and a coop for a month on a try-before-you buy scheme. All that needs to be done now is to find a dog trainer willing to add chook etiquette into their dog obedience classes. I’ll ponder it while I wait for my egg – from Mad Sylvia, bless her - to boil.