What do you do with excess eggs?

[EvelynTension]

We have six laying hens, some only just beginning, and although they are on a slow tip for the moment due to it being cold and dark an'all, I'm actually dreading the onset of more fervent laying because I don't know what to do with the eggs.

We have two neighbours who take a box a week (I give them away) and my folks take one a fortnight. We don't use a lot ourselves - I don't have time to bake so really we might get through a box a fortnight too.

I'm worried about selling them in case I manage to sell a dodgy one or something, also we're not registered/regulated by anyone.

I would be so glad of any ideas before we start getting 6 a day. Thanks.

I give them to work colleagues and my mil. The ones that we don't use and I keep too long just get chucked out. We do give some to an old lady down the road, but she gave ds1 50p last time which I didn't want

I sell them to friends/neigbours for £1 a box. Helps to cover feed costs etc. Although, I am rather of an egg glut You don't need to be registered or regulated to sell eggs 'at the gate'.

Thanks for the ideas. I might think about selling a few at school.

It would certainly help with costs! They are eating loads atm

ilovemyhens, it can be hard to accept gifts and not be able to reciprocate - why not let ds accept the money and say that he will give it to the rspca or any chicken charity you can think of?

We have a similar problem in summer - we have omlettes, egg curry, Spanish omelettes, custards, boiled eggs in mustard sauce, scrambled eggs for breakfast, Scotch eggs, eggs stirred into pasta, egg fried rice ... sometimes we have no other protein for weeks!

You can freeze beaten egg for use later which is handy for omlettes etc. We have pancake breakfasts, big spanish tortilla suppers and poached eggs on toast alot.

Eggs are a very healthy food and we have got to love them all over again

I was inundated with eggs this time last year
had already sold loads and frozen some for baking too. In the end I scrambled some in the microwave and fed them back to the chooks, they loved them. Just a couple every couple of days in the late afternoon with their corn, if you give them in the morning they won't eat their pellets/mash. Checked with other chicken keepers first to make sure it was an acceptable thing to do. I read somwhere about storing whole shelled eggs in jars of water and some stuff called waterglass (seemingly they did this during the war) but it all seemed a bit of a faff to me. Hellebore1

I scramble eggs for my dog when I have too many.

I think freezing (as recommended by Nigella for egg whites when you have used the yolks for other things!) sounds like a good plan, as well as revisiting your menu planning. Pancake day soon! Give some to the school for kids' cookery? If they are fresh that day, no need to worry, surely? I am not a chicken keeper but would like to be soon. We love eggs and buy trays of 30 at the local farm and always get through them before they go off (family of four).

I grew up on a chicken farm and had forgotten the dog feeding - we didn't cook the eggs for the dog, just broke them over his biscuits. Also for the cats.

I do know that eggs keep for an amazingly long time in the bottom of the fridge - weeks rather than days.

Everything we ate as children seemed to have a couple of eggs hidden in it - meatloaf with hard boiled eggs in, vegetable stews with hardboiled eggs in, potato salad with chopped hard boiled eggs ... one of our favourites was pasta, lightly drained so that there is still some water, with several beaten eggs added, with maybe a dollop of plain yogurt and some herbs and then stirred over a very low heat; it makes a creamy sauce.

as previous poster said you can store eggs for almost a year with issingglass, you should get its components from pharmacies. I have never used it but my neighbours used to. What put me off was the mentioning that it gave eggs a slightly odd taste (nothing poisonous but it just changed the taste).

One way is to have a baking day every week. Bake lots of cakes, pancakes and omelettes and then freeze them. Alternatively, have slightly fewer hens???

pickling? or is that just me?

I just give my excess away. Neighbours are always grateful for a box and I often give my childminder some. My sister calls every few days and puts in an order, so with all that and what we eat at home & use in baking, we don't tend to have much of a glut.

We have at least 1 eggy meal and a baking session every week.

I rang cancer research for a donation box which they duly gave. I now take my eggs to work and my colleagues give a donation in exchange.

We have 19 layers, so you can imagine...

Relatives get them, our dogs do, and so does the postman and the binmen..

The teachers get them, the priest does, the neighbours do, the list goes on and on..

Souffles are a good way of using up lots of eggs There is a Jane Grigson recipe for parsnip, mushroom and garlic souffle which was my party piece for quite a while. They are dead easy to make - if you can make white sauce you can make a souffle - and absolutely delicious.

On a similar theme, try souffle omelets, where you separate the eggs, whip the whites and then fold the yolks back in before you cook them.

Every dog we have ever owned has loved a raw egg broken over its' dinner. However, I would hesitate to feed eggs back to the chickens - I would worry about it encouraging the hens to find their own eggs to eat, which you might not be so keen on in the longer run.

As OP suggests, if you really want to feed eggs back to chickens, I would cook them (the eggs not the chickens) to prevent giving them a taste for fresh eggs.

Thanks to you all I gave the dogs a raw egg each.... The effect was nose wrenching . Not sure my dogs are welcome in polite society if they eat raw eggs.....