Bantam Eggs and Bananas

Last winter my loving husband and our dear son determined that the best type of chicken to show for 4-H was white leghorn bantams.  Before I could get the words 'but wait!' from my mouth, we had three chicks living in a horse trough in our garage.  I should be used to these things now.  

True story.  Once upon a time we had a cute little chicken coop but no chickens.  Then about two years ago, quite unexpectedly, that same loving husband and son brought home a dozen Rhode Island red chicks. 


I shut myself in my closet and wept copiously.  And I never cry.  Chickens freak me out.  On top of that, they are one more thing that tie us down and mean we can never go anywhere for longer than 12 hours at a stretch.  

But I digress.  Aside from the one chick that turned out to be a rooster, surprisingly I've come to appreciate the chickens more than I resent them.  Those hens produce a lot of eggs.  And so do the ten buff orpingtons that came to live in our chicken coop the following year.... 

When you live in the country outside a little town so small the grocery store closes at 6, you come to appreciate convenience like a fridge full of eggs.

Anyway.  Our son showed Big Mike, Juliette and Minnie over the summer, and they all got blue ribbons.  I did understand that they needed to stay in the horse trough in the garage until he showed them, because they would have been dirty and hen-pecked, as they say, if they would have lived with the rest of the flock.  But it's October, and the fair was back in July, and I still have three chickens in a horse trough in my garage.  On nice days, my son puts them outside in a dog run (with no dogs, of course).  No one (but me) can bear to put them in the coop, where nature's 'pecking' order would likely result in us being down three little chickens.

I love the farm life.

So let me wrap around to the moral of this long story.  Turns out, bantam hens lay really little eggs.  I once made an angel food cake with two dozen of them.  They tend to pile up in our fridge in favor of the more normal sized eggs the other hens lay.  I needed to get rid of some eggs and some they're-so-ripe-I-must-use-them-today-or-throw-them-out bananas, so I whipped up these healthy muffins for the kids' breakfast.  

Banana Oat Muffins
Roughly adapted from The Complete Book of Baking, 1993

1/2 c sugar
1/2 c butter, room temperature
2 bantam eggs (or just one regular-sized one)
1/4 c milk
2 ripe bananas
1 t vanilla
1 c whole wheat flour 
1/2 c old-fashioned oats
1 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
chopped nuts
cinnamon and sugar
6 jumbo cupcake liners

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream sugar and butter until fluffy.  Add eggs, milk, bananas and vanilla and beat until well blended.  Add flour, oats, baking soda and salt and mix until just combined.  Spray cupcake liners with cooking spray, and fill each liner about 2/3 full with batter.  Sprinkle tops with nuts and cinnamon sugar mixture.  Place in oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until done.  Cool on a baking rack, then feed to bleary-eyed children before they leave for school.  Or just eat them yourself, if you want!