My grandmother has chickens and they live a fabulous Disney-esq life full of table scraps, grain, and white bread complete with a fancy chicken coop and a big grassy area to run around in. In general these chickens probably have a quality of life similar to your pet cat.

If you spend the night at my grandmother’s house you are woken up by the crowing of a large rooster. Sometimes the brave little chickens get out of their pen and run around the neighborhood. Now that’s what I call “free range.” Gram keeps in her neighbors good graces by making them incredible batches of peanut butter fudge and by also bestowing upon them dozens of amazing eggs that her pampered chickens lay.

When I go home to Maine I always request eggs to take back with me. They are fabulous beyond belief. Case in point: they are almost twice the size of normal extra-large organic eggs that you buy in the grocery store. The yolks are a bright orange color as opposed to the much paler yellow that you see above. In fact the yolks are so orange that everyone in my family has learned not to use them in white foods as we’ve all ended up with bright orange lasagna and funky colored cakes due to Gram’s delicious (but neon) eggs. In general I treat these eggs like culinary diamonds. They are reserved for weekend omelets and fluffy scrambles on lazy Sunday mornings. We’ll seriously get into a fight if you try to use one of these to make anything as mundane as a boxed corn muffin mix. I’m not kidding!

So now the “big thing” in the cooking world this week is making your own butter, which reminded me of a truly ridiculous PowerPoint that I made for a history class that I took in college.

My grandmother used to work at a living history museum called “The Norlands” where she portrayed a 19th century suffragist, Esther Weld, and led educational programs for students. My assignment for class was to create some sort of historical food presentation so my grandmother and I dressed up in period garb, pretended to bake a cake in her wood cook stove, and then made homemade butter. Which took forever. Click here to download the staged hilarity in all of its amateur glory.