68 martha’s vineyard • not summer 2010–2011 not summer 2010–2011 • martha’s vineyard 69

The stretch of New Lane just north of Pond View Farm Road in West Tisbury has its very own ornithological sound track. Songbirds warble as they dip and dive between feeders, crows squawk from their tall-branch

perches, and every now and then the dense shrubs rustle as a procession of wild turkey hens emerges, the portly gals clucking and purring as they shake their tail feathers. It’s an avian sym-phony of free improvisation. But as you round the bend where the Small family mailbox is staked at the edge of the rough-cut grass, the tune becomes distinctly barnyard-like: a faint coo-ing and fluttery murmur, which, as anyone who ventures up their driveway can see, comes from Alix deSeife Small’s flock of chickens, chattering away.

It’s a fairly common occurrence these days to happen upon a few chickens – or, at Alix’s house, forty-three as of last count – pecking and scratching in the yard. More and more people are latching onto the idea of eating ultra-fresh, Island-sourced food, and an egg (which by nature appeals to a locavore’s purist sensi-bilities) isn’t going to come from anywhere closer than your own backyard. And word is getting out that poultry rearing is a very doable home-grown project that requires little to no agricultural training.

That’s what Alix figured back in the late nineties when she and her husband, Dan, bought their West Tisbury vacation home and at the same time moved from Miami to a rented house in Newton that happened to be outfitted with an “incred-ible” chicken coop. The couple’s professional careers couldn’t have kept them any further from farm life. Alix is a former Democratic political consultant and press secretary for John Kerry’s senatorial campaign who’s turned into a textile designer and recently converted her family’s guest house into a yarn shop called Vineyard Knitworks; Dan is a Boston-based attor-ney. But Alix says they “always wanted to get back to the land”

by elizabeth bomze

photographs by randi baird

The coop scoopOne family’s take on raising chickens at home and eating fresh eggs

Food

Forty-three chickens lay a lot of eggs, as Alix deSeife Small can attest;

this fall she’s expecting forty more hens at Vineyard Eggworks.

70 martha’s vineyard • not summer 2010–2011 not summer 2010–2011 • martha’s vineyard 71

and thought these two new venues offered them the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

“We went to an agricultural auction in Cape May, New Jersey, and bought guinea hens,” she recalls of their first venture. “One escaped, and then we bought more of them through the mail. Then, as an evolu-tion of that, we got chickens.”

Heavenly henhouses

That initial flock of birds, which spent their first winter under lights in the Newton coop, turned out to be very stable travel-ers; as Alix, Dan, and their now-teenaged children, Bailey, Gabrielle, and Schuyler, shuttled between homes, the chickens came too.

“We just packed them right up into the car,” Alix says, laughing.

Naturally, birds have come and gone over the years. An entire flock of twenty-four, quite tragically, went to a hungry raccoon back in 2000, and one particularly vociferous rooster’s late-night crowing in Miami irritated Dan so much that he charged out of bed at 1:30 a.m., drove the bird (and a supply of food) to a nearby

marina, and sped away back to bed. But over time the Smalls have brought more and more birds home to roost and have set up runs at all three of their houses to ac-commodate them. The family currently has other residences in Manchester-by-the-Sea and Miami.

“My chickens have second and third homes,” Alix admits sheepishly. “When we moved into the Manchester house, the chickens lived in the pool house for a while. One day, I found out that a men’s club was getting rid of an old tool shed, so I paid a friend to convert the shed into a coop. It turned out really nice. Now we have the Taj Mahal of chicken coops [in Manchester].”

As coops go, the Vineyard digs are hard-ly Spartan. A squat henhouse for nighttime dwelling has recently been joined by what Alix calls a palace, which can accommodate forty more chickens (arriving this fall); there’s also a tall fence and sweeping, pan-oramic views of the six-acre property. And the chickens aren’t cooped up all the time, though Alix doesn’t let them free-range far from the pen because a family of red-tailed hawks lives in the lower field. But visitors

to the adjacent yarn shop are likely to be met by at least one hen meandering around the yard. On my visit, a plump, plumy bird with soft, charcoal-gray feathers and a daz-zling coral-red coxcomb waddled over to me and affectionately grazed my leg as if it were a dog hankering for a behind-the-ears scratch.

“Our chickens are like house pets,” Alix says, confirming my anecdote. “We name them: There’s Stella, from A Streetcar Named Desire. Then there’s Duchess, Cec-ily, and Marigold. They come when they’re called, and they run to greet you.”

Alix likes to mix chicken breeds. After she recovered from the raccoon incident (the trauma of which discouraged her from raising chickens for a few years), she replenished the flock gradually. Four chicks came home from a birthday party with Dan and their daughters, followed by eight Rhode Island Reds – auburn-feathered fowl with spiky, bright red combs and matching wattles – that Alix bought from a hatchery in Ipswich, and then another surprise from her husband and children.

“I remember the day,” she says. “It was

December 19, 2008, and there was a knock on the door from the mailman. He handed me twenty-four chicks in a box, which my husband and kids had apparently ordered.”

Four of them didn’t make it, but the others – a mixture that included tufted Araucanas and Barred Rocks – were hap-pily cohabiting, not to mention producing more eggs than Alix knew what to do with.

“I was getting thirty-six to forty eggs a day, so I had to store them in two refrigera-tors. I was giving eggs to the senior center, to the House at New Lane bed and break-fast, to friends – anyone who would take them,” she says. “I never sold the eggs.”

Hatching a new venture

The beauty of her motley crew – with their varied personalities and polychromatic feathers – extends to the many shades of eggs they produce. On any given day, Alix will collect tan-colored eggs tinged with pink from her Barred Rocks, pale green-blue specimens from the Araucanas, and classic New England brown eggs from the Rhode Island Reds. The production became

so regular and reliable a few years ago, she thought she’d try selling some.

“I brought a few cartons into the Vine-yard Haven Yacht Club, where I work as the office manager in the summer. I couldn’t keep them there for more than half an hour.”

Since then, she’s started selling to the Tisbury Farm Market under the label Vineyard Eggworks (to match the yarn shop brand). Demand has been high enough that she usually replenishes the stock twice a week. Plus, she wants people to experience her eggs – always organic – at their best.

“With a fresh egg,” she explains, “the yolk sits up; with an older egg, it spreads out.”

What’s more, Alix won’t sell eggs from her own shop refrigerator that are more than two weeks out of the nest. (Though they never remain that long anyway, she notes.) She also doesn’t believe in price-gouging fellow egg enthusiasts.

“I sell them for $3 per dozen,” she says, noting her prices rival those of non-organic commercial eggs in some markets, both on- and off-Island. “Whether you have

money or not, you have the right to high quality, fresh food.”

With any luck, Alix’s next step will be breeding her own chicks. Her first coop may become a brooding coop (where mother hens will roost on the eggs un-til they hatch). She also began another grass-roots initiative last winter to ramp up her own vegetable patch, thanks to some organic farming guidance she’s received from Mitch Posin at Allen Farm in Chil-mark. She probably won’t be selling much of the produce, but, just as with the eggs, she’s enjoying the quality and unparalleled convenience of walking out her back door to pick vegetables like mini Japanese egg-plants and baby Brussels sprouts.

“You do it because you love it,” she says, “and because you want to know where your food comes from. I think we’re getting back to a point in civilization where people will have to have backyard gardens and three to four chickens. The quality of the food is so unbelievably superior to what’s in the supermarket. And there’s something incredibly satisfying about doing it from scratch.”

Alix displays the multicolored eggs she’s gathered one chilly autumn afternoon; a Barred Rock rooster lets out a holler outside the henhouse.From left: An Araucana chicken with luxuriant golden feathers warily eyes a visitor; a Rhode Island Red pecks at the ground scattered with grain.

72 martha’s vineyard • not summer 2010–2011 not summer 2010–2011 • martha’s vineyard 73

Egg recipes

• 1 cup shaved Parmigiano Reggiano

cheese

• 3–4 tomatoes, sliced

1. Mix together the flour, sugar, and salt. Beat

in the eggs, milk, and cream until the batter is

homogenous. Let the batter rest.

2. Toss arugula with olive oil and black pepper.

3. Heat a nonstick skillet or griddle over medium-

high heat and brush with melted butter. Pour

roughly 1/4 cup batter into pan and cook until

underside is spotty golden brown, just a minute

or two; flip and cook another minute or so. Slide

finished crêpe onto a serving plate, top with 2

or 3 pieces of prosciutto, and fold in half. Repeat

with remaining batter and prosciutto.

4. Meanwhile, fill a wide pan about four inches

deep with water. Add the white wine vinegar

and bring to a simmer. Carefully break eggs into

the water and poach for about 1 1/2 minutes.

Using a slotted spoon, lift out one egg and check

if it is cooked to your liking.

5. For each serving, top 2 folded crêpes with Par-

migiano Reggiano cheese, 2 poached eggs, sliced

tomato, and arugula, and serve immediately.

Cutty’s egg salad sandwiches

Charles Kelsey, his wife, Rachel, and their son,

Henry, spend time at their family home in Oak

Bluffs in the summer. This egg salad is a lunch

staple for them, and one that they serve at

Cutty’s, their recently opened sandwich café in

Brookline. Note: This recipe can easily be cut in

half. Super-fresh eggs always taste great, but

slightly older eggs will be easier to peel after

hard-boiling.

Serves 6

• 1 dozen eggs

• 1 small shallot, finely grated

• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, and more to taste

• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper,

and more to taste

• Pinch cayenne pepper, and more to taste

• 1/2 cup mayonnaise

• 12 slices whole-wheat sandwich bread

• 8 medium radishes, trimmed and thinly

sliced

• 1/3 cup oil-cured black olives, pitted and

coarsely chopped

• 1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

1. In a large saucepan, combine the eggs and 3

quarts water. Bring the water to a boil, cover

the pot, turn off the heat, and let sit for 10 to

12 minutes, depending on the size of your eggs.

Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with ice water. Drain

the eggs, transfer to the ice water, and let sit for

about 10 minutes, until cool. Peel the eggs and

chop coarsely.

2. While the eggs cook, in a small bowl whisk

the shallot, vinegar, mustard, salt, black pepper,

and cayenne pepper together and let sit for 15

minutes.

3. In a large bowl, gently fold the eggs, shallot

mixture, and mayonnaise together until just

combined. Season with salt, black pepper, and

cayenne pepper to taste.

4. To assemble the sandwiches, lay out six slices

of bread and spread the radish slices over them.

Divide the egg salad evenly in six portions and

spoon it over the radish slices. Sprinkle the

olives and cilantro atop the egg salad on each

sandwich, then place the second piece of bread

on top.

Lavender crème brûlée from the

Sweet Life Café

As with the rest of the menu at the Sweet

Life Café in Oak Bluffs, the dessert offerings

change from time to time, but this rich,

lavender-scented custard with a bronzed,

crackly top is a mainstay.

Serves 6

• 1 quart heavy cream

• 2 1/2 tablespoons dried or fresh lavender

• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• 2 eggs, plus 6 egg yolks

• 2/3 cup sugar, plus 1/2 cup for the brûlée

topping

• Hot water (approximately 2 quarts)

1. In a medium, heavy-bottomed saucepan,

heat the cream and lavender until boiling.

Remove from heat.

2. In a large bowl, thoroughly whisk the va-

nilla, eggs, yolks, and 2/3 cup sugar. Slowly add

the cream and lavender to the sugar mixture

to temper, so that it warms it up gently (if the

hot liquid is added all at once, the eggs will

start to cook too much). Let steep for at least

an hour at room temperature to absorb the

lavender flavor. Strain to remove the laven-

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der and pour the custard into six 6-ounce

ramekins.

3. Preheat oven to 200 degrees (use convec-

tion oven if possible). Place the ramekins in a

large cake pan or roasting pan. Pour enough

hot water into the pan to come halfway up the

outside of the ramekins. Bake until the custard

is just set but still trembling in the center

and the temperature reads 170 to 175 on an

instant-read thermometer, approximately 30

to 40 minutes. Remove the ramekins from the

roasting pan, cool to room temperature, cover

with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2

hours and up to 3 days.

4. Remove the ramekins from the refrigera-

tor at least 30 minutes before serving time.

(Dab custard gently with paper towel if any

moisture beads formed during chilling.) Evenly

sprinkle the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar atop

the 6 custards. Use a kitchen blowtorch to

caramelize the sugar to form a deep-brown

crisp crust on top. If you don’t have a blow-

torch handy, preheat oven to broil with a

rack positioned just below the broiler. Place

ramekins on a baking sheet under broiler until

sugar melts, about 2 minutes. Keep oven door

open to avoid overheating the custard, and

watch carefully so as not to burn. Allow the

crème brûlée to sit for a few minutes before

serving. u

ArtCliff crêpes with prosciutto,

Parmigiano Reggiano, and poached

eggs

This is one of many egg specials that chef/owner

Gina Stanley serves at the ArtCliff Diner in

Vineyard Haven. A strong advocate of using local

ingredients, Gina always has Island eggs at her

restaurant, usually from Blackwater Farm in

West Tisbury.

Makes 12–16 crêpes to serve 6–8

• 1 cup all-purpose flour

• 1 tablespoon sugar

• Pinch salt

• 2 eggs

• 1 1/4 cups milk

• 1/3 cup heavy cream

• 5 ounces baby arugula, washed and spun dry

• 1/4 cup olive oil

• Cracked black pepper

• Melted butter for cooking

• 24–30 pieces prosciutto di Parma

• 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

• 12–16 eggs (2 eggs per person)

This scrumptious egg-and-crêpes dish from the ArtCliff Diner includes all the major food groups.

Lavender crème brûlée, prepared by Setzu Zeender, pastry chef at the Sweet Life Café in Oak Bluffs.