Weekend food with Darina Allen

EGGS are a totally magical ingredient, the quintessential fast food, versatile and nourishing. Think about it: if you have two boiled eggs or, in the case of hungry chaps, three or four for supper with a few slices of brown soda bread, you’ll feel deliciously sated.

They need to be good eggs, of course, really fresh and preferably free range and organic.

The exciting thing is that a growing number of people have been smitten by the ‘fancy fowl’ bug. All over the country people are keeping a few hens in their back gardens and have discovered the joy of collecting and eating their own freshly laid eggs.

Kids of all ages love hens and it’s a brilliant way to reconnect them with how food is produced.

Several local schools have a chicken coop with a couple of hens and the children learn how to care for them.

It’s a brilliant way to foster entrepreneurial spirit — several have started to keep hens at home and sell the eggs to their mammy’s friends and the neighbours.

It’s win win all the way. Instead of paying the council to dispose of the scraps from your cooking they can be fed to hens and you’ll be rewarded with beautiful eggs a few days later.

The hen ‘poo’ is a brilliant addition to your compost, which in turn can go into the garden to make the soil more fertile to grow healthy, beautiful fruit and vegetables.

For those of us who do have hens, winter can be challenging — hens don’t love cold weather any more than we do so their productivity is diminished. But as soon as the weather improves they start to lay with gay abandon.

Suddenly there’s a glut of eggs. There are several ways of preserving eggs.

My favourite short-term way of preserving eggs is Buttered Eggs — a simple technique which seals the shell and gives the eggs a delicious curdy texture.

Pickled eggs are another brilliant solution. They are a great favourite in British pubs and deserve to be much better known over here, as do Scotch Eggs, which are having a terrific revival.