Happy Hens & Fresh Eggs: Keeping Chickens in the Kitchen Garden

Professional cook and food writer Langford combines her love of food, gardens, and backyard chickens in her scattered but delightful first book. The book is a hybrid of several genres: part cookbook, part memoir, part how-to-raise-backyard-chickens manual, and even part sketchbook. The genres, for the most part, blend together seamlessly and add to the unique charm of Langford's creation. A few negative family anecdotes seem out of place, but they're brief and easily overlookd. The book is divided into four sections by season. Each section is then broken down into two parts, the first providing advice on raising backyard chickens and on gardening with chickens in general, and the second providing seasonal recipes for free-range eggs. Langford's tips and tricks for chicken tending don't go into much detail, but they are helpful in that they will get chicken owners and would-be chicken owners thinking about a wide variety of issues that go hand-in-hand with urban hen-keeping. Similarly, some of the recipes lack specifics, such as the required temperature, but the wide variety will appeal to many tastes and skill-levels. (May)