Oh that's terrible about the chick and the lady. I'll bet she has been in therapy and will stay in therapy for the rest of her life over that..lol.
For some reason the stringy thing never concerned me. My grandmother would remove them if they were big, she called them the "roosters" but I never cared but a blood spot and I just have to throw it away. I believe it's because my mom was grossed out by the blood and she passed it onto me.
Things are cultural and we eat things some other cultures would never eat and vice versa.
To the PP I have tasted blood sausage and I hate it! I think it's something you have to be raised eating like pickled pigs feet. Yup, I used to "eat the tar" out of some pickled pigs feet even playing with the feet pretending they were walking but at some point I looked at them a little differently (around 12) and decided I didn't like them anymore.
My niece will not eat chicken at all because when she was little she realized that was a vein in her chicken leg. She passed "some" of her phobia onto her son and my sister was telling me the other day he, her grandson, was over and she was giving the chicken a bath (that's what we call it) and he was intrigued by the uncooked chicken but grossed out at the same time. She said he couldn't stay out of the kitchen watching her but he kept gagging. She laughed so hard (and so am I). She said he kept saying "That's gross Mam'ma" and he'd gag but he wouldn't LEAVE. After the chicken was cooked and she put a piece on his plate (fried) he was hesitant but began to eat it and marveled all during dinner how it was so gross seeing it "like that" but it tasted good. No more gaggin.
Heck when my I was little my mom would hold the chicken up by it's wings and make it dance and tell the chicke to lift his arm so she could wash under it. We thought it was funny but secretly a little gross too. Oh she did that with turkeys too.
Anyway not sure what my point was, sorry I rambled.
LOL! I know! At around 5, my daughter proclaimed that it was mean to kill and eat animals and has not eaten meat in 3 years! It all started when I told her to eat her chicken and she said, "Mom, when you call it chicken, do you mean like a real chicken?" I said of course, what else? She was so upset! My other daughter, complete opposite, when my daughter says, how can you eat steak, it is a cow, my eldest says, Yeah, but it tastes, gooooooooood! LOL!
LOL! I know! At around 5, my daughter proclaimed that it was mean to kill and eat animals and has not eaten meat in 3 years! It all started when I told her to eat her chicken and she said, "Mom, when you call it chicken, do you mean like a real chicken?" I said of course, what else? She was so upset! My other daughter, complete opposite, when my daughter says, how can you eat steak, it is a cow, my eldest says, Yeah, but it tastes, gooooooooood! LOL!
Years ago I was at my friends house and her little brother asked his mom, while we were eating chicken, where it came from. She told it it grew out of the ground like corn. He saved all the chicken leg bones and the little bone from the thighs and planted them with the tops sticking out of the dirt HAHAH in the planter in the front yard. For WEEKS I saw him get home from school and get a glass of water and water those things...lmao...Not sure when he found out the truth.
What about twins?
Do you guys use those?
Do you mean double yolk eggs? Oh yes those were considered "the prize". Double yolk means nothing is different except two yolk sacs. If they had been fertiziled I "guess" it could have produced twins but remember the yolk sacs are really just food for the chicks it isn't the chicks themselves.
If a little spot in an egg bugs you, please don't try blood sausage.
I laughed at this. My Grandmother is German and there is a Germany store in Dallas that we will take her to so she can get some stuff.
My dad will buy the blood sausage for him and my nephew. My nephew loves it, but we refer to it by the name of it, we don't tell him what it translates to.
What about twins?
Do you guys use those?
Do you mean double yolk eggs? Oh yes those were considered "the prize". Double yolk means nothing is different except two yolk sacs. If they had been fertiziled I "guess" it could have produced twins but remember the yolk sacs are really just food for the chicks it isn't the chicks themselves.
I know the white is what becomes the chick and the yolk is the nutrition for the chick but since there are 2 yolks I just assumed that meant there was supposed to be 2 chicks?
Or one really well fed chick...lol
Thanks, m1m. I sure loved that cow. I raised her from a calf and she gave me 10 gal of milk/day. That's why I went into cheese making in such a big way.
One last factoid re eggs and then I will quit. (I never realized this thread would get this long...)
The white, or albumin, is not what grows to be the chick. Its purpose is merely to support the yolk and provide additional nutrition. On a fertilized egg, if one looks closely, can be found a small white spot. You have to be looking for it. This is called the germinal disc and is the very beginning of the future chicken. I had never given much thought as to whether twins could result if both were fertilized. They started out as two fertilized ova and somewhere along down the oviduct they both got combined at the shell "application" site. This occurs just before leaving the hen's body. So, in theory, and quite possibly, this could happen. I can't see how the chick(s) could fare very well though for the shell is nonelastic and would inhibit proper growth.
When getting one I have just thought, wow! double good and called the kids to see. They usually would be argued over as to who got the treat.
On a side note: It is true that the eggs do get larger as the hen ages. We used to joke, when seeing an extraordinarily large one, that is was called an "Ooooh, ahhhh!" egg. This in reference to what the hen must have said when finished.
As you can see, I love chickens. People call them dumb as a box of rocks, but they seem to have a sort of group intelligence. They do provide a lot of stories and I could write a whole book about them.
I guess I should apologize for hi-jacking this thread. Sure was fun, though.
I just want to make sure that I'm understanding this.
An egg is essentially a hen's period. Right?
Yak.
To be succinct, yes.
This is the first time ever I have said...yak.
(But I still love and eat them. I just divert my thought from mammals to birds.)
Do chickens lay eggs everyday?
And if so how do they "create" the egg so quickly?
Also does it hurt a chicken to lay an egg, kinda like labor?
Sorry always wanted to know these things.
Yes, they can lay an egg a day. Those are the most valuable layers, as you can imagine.
They can create an egg so quickly because there are a number of them in the "production process" for lack of a better word, at one time. When butchering a hen you will find a whole "rope" of them in various stages of development. (Some cultures eat these as a delicacy, but I never got to that point.)
I can't speak first hand, but it doesn't seem to hurt them. (Even the ooooh ahhhs are a product of my imagination...being a little anthropomorphic here!) The hen will stand and perhaps rock back and forth a little then it just slips out. It is covered with a film of moisture that dries within seconds. This helps protect the egg, (extending the storage life in the refrigerator if not washed off. If the egg is dirty, a brief cleaning in warm water, but limited scrubbing is advised.)
I have held my hand under the hen as she is laying and caught the egg just to see the surprised look on her face, (really!) when she turns around to see her accomplishment and finds nothing! Who says farm life isn't a hoot?
Yes, chickens do lay eggs everyday, with few exceptions. Weather can affect their laying. Even getting them upset will affect it. When the foxes would get in the pen at night, ours wouldn't lay for a couple of days.
They have a long track of eggs that are constantly developing. It is nothing like human reproduction. I'm confused about the comparison above. I've actually seen a hen's egg-laying track(if that's what it is called). It's very interesting if you don't get grossed out. It's a long tube with big, fully made eggs on one end and the eggs get smaller and less developed as it goes down. At one point, the egg is just the yolk, and then it has a soft shell and gets bigger. Really cool!
I don't think it hurts a chicken to lay an egg. They get excited about it and started cackling after they lay an egg, maybe to announce it to the rest of the chickens.
I love your stories milkmaid. We always had chickens when I was a kid. I even had a pet chicken. She was the only chicken that didn't go to the stew pot when she got too old to lay. One time, when she was broody, we put our duck eggs under her to hatch since the ducks seemed too dumb to set. Well, she hatched those baby ducks. We put them all by the duck pond and you should have seen her when her babies all ran to swim in the water. She was a good mother and clucked for them to come back and stood at the water's edge all worried and clucking and scratching until they did. She raised them until they were big enough to be on their own. It was the sweetest thing to watch.
KathysCC, what a cute story. What a fun thread this has been to read. Starting from blod spots in eggs to sweet childhood stories from the farm.
In our family we only buy eggs from a few specific local farms (that we buy from Mom's-My Organic Market). One day we took a day trip to one of them (after scheduling a visit) and our kids got to feed the hens (sunflower seeds) and handpick eggs to take home. Even though we live in the city, I think it's important that children grow up with an understanding of where your food comes from. And we made lots of fun memories that day!
That's so interesting, they are little self contained egg factories.
Growing up our babysitter had chickens but all I remember was they were the meanest things ever, you could'nt walk by them without getting attacked, and the turkey was the worst he would chase you all the way back into the house if you dared venture anywhere near him!
OK, you guys asked for it! I hadn't intended to post this, but cannot resist.
Years ago I had a customer come wanting farm fresh eggs. I wasn't home at the time, so my elderly father handled it. We were one egg short of what she wanted, so my dad had her wait while he went to check the hens. Unfortunately, I had allowed one hen to set, (to incubate her eggs). I had marked her eggs with a wax marker so I would know which not to take. Since she frequently turned them in the nest, most of the markings had worn off. I could recognize them for they looked worn and old, but Dad didn't know this.
When he told me, I felt sick. That egg was two days away from hatching. It was a new customer so I couldn't call and warn her. I still have nightmares of the imagined scene... Like maybe cracking an egg directly into a bowl as the cookie dough mixed? I do know there is a woman somewhere today who will NEVER use a farm fresh egg again.
And aside from the gross-osity of seeing that mess, let me tell you, cracking open an incubating chicken egg makes one of the most hellacious, horrible, gut-wrenching smells you could ever imagine. I take care of my mom's chickens for her when she goes out of town. I once mistakenly broke open an egg that was only a few days from hatching, and let me tell you, that must be what hell smells like.
This thread is educational and hilarious at the same time!!
KathysCC...OK, eggs aren't truly analogous to human reproduction, so perhaps the comparison isn't apt. There could be so much more detail that I didn't want to get into re the differences between embryos developed within the body VS those without. Quite frankly, it has been so many years since I've had embryology that I have forgotten much. But in a very rough way...
And CakeMommy...We had a rooster that was so mean the boys didn't dare turn their backs on him. I finally had enough, not to mention a surfeit of roosters, that I decided he was ready for the pot. I made a lovely chicken stew, but he was so tough we couldn't eat him. Not to let anything go to waste, I ground the meat and made "Swedish meatballs" out of him--delicious with chicken gravy over homemade noodles. We still talk about him to this day.
I swear, this has got to be my last post. (This site is SO addicting and I really have a lot to do. Slow dial-up takes me twice as long.)
Adevag, you are so right about children learning where our food comes from. I remember when I let one of my little boys first gather eggs, he picked one up and promptly rapped it against the box. Naturally it broke and when questioned by me, he said "That's what you do!" I realized then that he had only observed me in the kitchen and yes, that is what you do with eggs!
And I love the story of the mother hen so concerned over her ducklings welfare in the pond...
And yes, it is the stink from HELL!
And did you know that turkeys snore? I discovered this while checking late at night on a cow due to calve. All my turkeys were on the barn roof, heads hanging over the edge...sawing away. Really quite a racket. (I guess they needed C-paps. I had been fattening them up for Thanksgiving and they were rather obese!)
Aww! Keep posting milkmaid. I think we are finished talking about egg blood spots! We have that covered! 
Yeah, I know about old eggs. Some of them actually explode from the built up gases in them. We had that happen once when my mom was seeing if the leftover eggs had chicks in them.
I have a mean rooster story. When we got home from school one day, my mom told us how the rooster had attacked my baby sister who was just learning to walk. My mom found her on the ground with the rooster on her chest getting ready to peck her face. We asked what she did and she said, "what do you think we are having for supper tonight?" She used to put them in the pressure cooker...that softened up the tough meat.
milkmaid, you seem more well-versed in chicken egg production that I am. I was just saying that they did seem quite different from humans. I don't think I've actually studied how they are different. Would be interesting to know though.
Fat snoring turkeys....LOL!
I realize we're getting way off topic, but I need some enlightenment here. As a person who raises chickens, I don't get the "vegetarian fed" thing. Do you realize that vegetarian chickens aren't allowed to free range and eat what they really want to eat, which is bugs? Why do some people seem to think vegetarian fed chickens are better? Someone please straighten this out for me.
Stephanie
Dang, what a whole lotta wimps here.
Blood spots aren't dangerous, don't mean the egg is bad and don't mean it's fertilized. Do some research before you start tossing food. Oh, and I guess y'all never eat out, either.
That said, if I'm using eggs at the kitchen at shul I won't use an egg with a blood spot. At home or at work... no problem (I don't keep kosher at home).
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