It’s my fault the long-promised photo essay about the Thai pork candy has yet to appear. I can’t seem to function properly with this borrowed computer. Soon. Very soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this article from today’s Washington Post Home section about the rising popularity of chickens in the DC area. Home instead of Food, you ask? Indeed, for today’s article explains how you can keep chickens in the DC area (and talks about how you can’t if you’re in DC).

In “Hot Chicks - Legal or Not, Chickens Are the Chic New Backyard Addition,” Adrian Higgins writes:

“Chickens are America’s cool new pet,” said Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry. When he launched it three years ago, “we were thinking 15 to 20 thousand” subscriptions, he said. The print run for the bimonthly is now 100,000.

Belanger’s magazine is published in Wisconsin, where five years ago chicken activists in Madison succeeded in getting the city council to reverse a ban on chicken coops. Madison’s ordinance is typical of other cities’. You can raise chickens for eggs, not meat; they must be enclosed in a coop or run; and it’s strictly a hen party: Roosters who crow day and night are prohibited.

I’ve wanted to get more chickens for years, but in Alexandria we’re just too close to our neighbors houses for it to be legal. The article captures the silliness of life with chickens quite well. Adrian Higgins writes, “So what’s it like to keep chickens? From what I gather, they are exasperating, dumb, funny, beautiful and so hopelessly ill-equipped to survive on their own that you have to love them.”

In high school one of my chores was to try to find where Greta laid her morning egg before one of the horses did. She had an affinity for the feedboxes and some of the horses really loved a bit of scrambled egg with their breakfast. And who wouldn’t? Fresh eggs are fantastic.

Now we buy our eggs from the farmer’s market - either the Del Ray Farmer’s market (sorry, can’t remember the farmer’s name - have to check this week) or from the nice EcoFriendly Foods folks at the Arlington Farmer’s Market. Buy good eggs. Seriously, you won’t regret it.

This is from last week, but it’s still entertaining: the National Chicken Council’s Richard Lobb sat down with Stephen Colbert to discuss the tragic chicken wing shortage that threatened Super Bowl Fortywhatever.

Fortunately, we all survived this near-catastrophe, but it was a close one!

I was just perusing the website of EcoFriendly Foods, an esteemed local, humane, organic, drug and hormone-free family farm in Virginia that supplies meat to many of DC’s fussier restaurants. Meatblogger Eric recently bought a chicken from them at the Arlington Farmer’s Market. Verdict? Tasty. And tasted just like chicken, which is more than you can say for a lot of chicken these days.
I’d advise not checking out their flickr group unless you enjoy imagery of meat in very fresh form. This is a meatblog, so I guess if you didn’t like those things you wouldn’t be here….