With Pesach approaching, you’re probably wondering, “What are we going to do about eggs this year? Should we raise our own chickens? It has to be cheaper.”
Eggs are expensive across the board. The non-Jews are panicking even more, and they don’t even have Pesach. They have their own egg-related holiday, but if they’re buying as many eggs for their one-day as we’re buying for 8, they’re going overboard. So why are they panicking? Probably because they haven’t seen the price of kosher meat. For us, eggs are still cheaper.
Chicken cutlets have shot up in price, for example. How does that work? How is there a shortage of chicken tops, but not bottoms? Are there just bottoms running around a farm somewhere? How are they shechting just a bottom? This is not a shaylah I am equipped to answer. Despite having chickens. All my chickens have tops and bottoms.
Yes, I have chickens. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I got two chicks – there’s Yapchick, who’s my main chicken, and there’s Baby Mo, who’s my emergency backup chicken. Yapchick was brought in by my daughter, who teaches kindergarten, and when we found out that chickens can’t live alone, my son Daniel brought home a second chicken (from his friend’s farm), which he named Baby Mo. The joke was that Baby Mo was bigger. But that dynamic has long since shifted, and Baby Mo is now about a third the size of Yapchick, who is currently more like Yapchicken.
For the most part, we’re not really pet people, but chickens are pets that give something back: Eggs. You can’t put a price on that.
Well, actually, you can, but it’s not a price I can print in a family newspaper.
But we were definitely excited about the eggs. This was when they were $3 a dozen, and we were like, “Oh, no!” So we figured, this would be free!
So first of all, they’re not free. For one thing, you have to get a coop. Coops cost money. Fortunately, Daniel, who’s a budding contractor, built a coop, and it cost only a few hundred dollars in materials.
You also have to build a nest within the coop. According to my research, (you also have to spend thousands of hours doing research) the nest has to be in a dark, secluded corner, because chickens like privacy when they’re laying eggs. Though they don’t mind time-sharing a nest, or even climbing in on top of each other if need be and getting their privacy at once.
But that’s not all. As it turns out, chickens don’t just lay eggs where you decide they should lay eggs. They might choose a random corner, and then the eggs can roll and get stepped on, they can get broken… They’re raw eggs.
So the question is, how do you get the chickens to know that you want them to lay in the nest? Should you post some kind of sign? Point at the nest, and then lay an egg yourself?
Pretty much, yeah. Basically, we had to borrow a fake egg that we could put in the nest in order to convince the chickens that someone had gone in there and decided it was a good spot to lay.
I’m wondering if the chickens take it in stride, or if they had a discussion about it:
“Where did this egg come from? Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Did the humans lay this?”
“I don’t know how humans work.”
You also have to feed them. Chicken feed itself is inexpensive – in fact, it’s a synonym for inexpensive – but if you want your eggs to have that special taste that differentiates for example, backyard tomatoes from store tomatoes, you can’t just feed them the same pellets that the egg factories do.
Fortunately, chickens eat everything that people eat. So we feed them leftovers. B”H, you can feed a chicken leftovers, which is more than I can say for my kids. They eat a lot of challah, for example.
I can’t wait to see if they all like matzah. Though that won’t keep prices down.
Second of all, if you’re thinking about producing your own eggs for Pesach, you’re probably too late. Because for example, last Pesach my family used 14 dozen eggs. I don’t know how many chickens you plan to get to meet those numbers in time for Pesach, but the average chicken lays 6 eggs per week maximum, and only once they’re adults. And only the hens do this. And before they’re adults, you don’t know what genders you have. You could be raising a big flock of boys; you have no idea.
You also want to make sure early on that your chickens are kosher. Because apparently, not all breeds are kosher. They need a mesorah. And only kosher chickens lay kosher eggs.
Yapchick is kosher. We were told that early on. The question is Baby Mo. Baby Mo doesn’t have a big red comb, or waddles (it has a beard instead), and it has five toes on each foot.
And you’re thinking, “If it has 5 toes, it’s not a chicken.” So I looked it up. No birds have five toes. There are only 5 recorded breeds of any birds with five toes, and they’re all chickens. Baby Mo doesn’t look like any of them.
For a while, I thought she might be something called a salmon faverolle, which sounds like a dish you might make l’kovod yom tov. Then my son found a picture of something called an Easter Egger Green Queen, which is a chicken that was selectively bred through years of shadchanus to lay green eggs. So basically I have a Dr. Seuss character.
In the meantime, I was spending a lot of time sending adorable pictures of my chicks to various rabbanim. So far, no rav has been able to identify it. So we can’t eat its eggs until it brings us a shtar yichus.
But the thought was that for now we were keeping it, because Yapchick still needed an emotional support companion. If Baby Mo turned out to be a boy, we were replacing it anyway, and if it turned out to be a girl, there’s no way its eggs would get mixed up with Yapchick’s, because Mo is a third the size. And if Yapchick turned out to be a boy, we were getting rid of all the chickens, because this whole society was being built around Yapchick in the first place.
And I say society, because then we got a third chicken. Not on purpose. I mentioned a few months back that we made a bar mitzvah for our son Gedalyah 3 hectic days after Sukkos. Well, on the Thursday before the bar mitzvah, Daniel, who is amazing at reading the room, showed up in our backyard with a box out of which he dumped a white chicken. Basically, he’d decided -- as a bar mitzvah present -- to surprise Gedalyah with a chicken. Like an old-timey bar mitzvah present. At an amazing time for all of us.
Because what Daniel didn’t know was that you can’t just dump a new chicken into an existing flock. There’s a whole days-long integration process, because otherwise the chickens fight with the newcomer. I didn’t have time for this.
For this new chicken, we decided to go with the name Henshe. We figured that name is very woke, in that it says what she is, and it gives her preferred pronoun.
We didn’t see our first egg until November, when Baby Mo started laying her treife eggs. Which are not green. They’re like an off-white. Like eggshell.
And we’re like, “Okay, Mo’s a girl. Apparently. Should we change her name? What girls’ names start with Mo?”
Morah.
Then we found out that Henshe’s a rooster. Should we change his name? To what? I’m thinking “Boychick.”
I feel like whatever clever name we give a chicken when we get it is the opposite gender of what it actually is. I don’t get ruach hakodesh when I name chickens, I get whatever the opposite of ruach hakodesh is.
The question, then, is what is Yapchick? Is that a boys’ name or a girls’ name? I would say Yapchick’s a boy’s name. A nickname maybe, but I can’t see my daughter looking at pictures and saying, “And that’s Devory, and that’s Chana S., and that’s Chana W… and that’s Yapchick.”
And apparently, it is a boy’s name, because as it turns out, Yapchick is a girl.
Mazel tov.
I was nervous about tasting them, because I wanted them to taste different than store-bought eggs, but also I didn’t, because if you have an egg that doesn’t taste like the eggs you’re used to, you immediately throw it out.
In the end, though, the eggs taste like more like regular eggs than eggs do. They’re definitely much better, is what I have to tell myself.
But even once the eggs start coming, they’re not guaranteed every day. You have to feed the chickens protein, because eggs are made of protein, and they have to come from somewhere. And protein is expensive. Eggs are the cheapest protein. How many eggs do I feed them in order for them to lay an egg?
So mostly, we’ve been giving them leftover cholent. Though Henshe eats most of it, as can be expected.
The goal was to pay less to maintain the chickens than it would cost to buy that amount of eggs. And right now, I have to keep 3 chickens alive for 2 weeks to get 1 dozen eggs. And that’s if Yapchick remembers to eat her protein. And doesn’t accidentally sit in a way that she lays her eggs outside of the nest. And if there are no blood spot shaylos, which there are about half the time.
But at least we get free eggs! Depending on how you define free.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
