Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Ben & Jerry's all the way! The Half-Baked is so delicious! It's the Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream mixed with their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream---swooning now!!

Thanks everyone for such great information--of course, I always knew that the definition of 'cage free' and 'organic' was pretty flexible, but it's interesting to see exactly how flexible it is--and excellent point simon, about how when chickens are raised well, we all benefit health-wise, and taste-wise.

I was a little surprised that 'vegetarian' for hens was considered to be bug-free. Even in foods for human consumption there are trace amounts of insects. I tended to assume that free-ranging hens at farms that honored their pledge and were vegetarian were allowed to eat insects.

LOL Pavlov.

Oh, if you do raise your own chickens, make sure you raise them away from any surrounding neighbors and you clean their sh!t up instead of just letting it sit or hosing it so it seeps into your neighbor's yard.

We had neighbors with chickens for a little while and I wanted to murder those people. That crap stinks *almost* as bad as pig sh!t. Fortunately, they had to sell the house asap and move.

In free range systems, the housing is of similar standard as the barn or aviary, but the hens are also required to have constant daytime access to an outdoor range mainly covered by vegetation. In the EU each hen must have at least 4 square metres of space allowance. The best systems have tree cover – this encourages birds to remain outdoors as they are less fearful of predators. Other systems with high welfare potential have small moveable hen houses so that the hens are kept in smaller groups and it is easy for all the hens to get out of the house onto the range during daylight hours. In organic production the hens have even more space each on the range (1 hen per 10 square metres in Soil Association standards) and the hens are not beak-trimmed.

There's more information about the differences on the Compassion in World Farming web pages about higher welfare alternatives to factory farmed eggs

what in the hell is wrong with a couple cases of beer, this stuff is easy and requires no mixing, stirring, additions of fruit or tiny umbrellas.

Go oldschool with a a bottle of Rye.

Baltimore, here! I practically grew up on chicken gizzards (which my Jewish grandmother called "pupiks"), livers and hearts. She would put all the giblets in the soup and by the time the soup was done they had been cooked to death and were tender. These days, I prefer the gizzards fried, just like the rest of the chicken.

Pick up some Pimm's No. 1 Cup and Google the Pimm's Cup Cocktail.
Use the cucumber stick variation with ginger ale as the mixer.

New/Traditional.
Aristocratic/Commonly refreshing.
Exotic/Weathered favorite.

Sure to be a hit and reviewed with raves!

whole foods sells packages of hearts and gizzards. or you can buy them at the greenmarket from the poultry vendors, although you may have to order them in advance.

i've never seen them on the menu in NYC. i had deep fried livers once at a cajun restaurant, years ago in hudson.

Effen Vodka. The name alone is an ice breaker. Comes flavored, too. Makes me laugh and it's good stuff - what more could you ask for?

Way more than you really asked but...

So far the only two labels to mean much in the United States are "Organic" which has more to do with the feed than much else though it does guarantee cage-free and "access" to the outdoors (not that there will be much out there for them so why would they bother?) and Certified Humane Raised via the Humane Society of the US acting as a third party certifier.

The best to buy is indeed to get them straight from a local farmer who has a small flock (I know one who has about 300 and another who has 44... now) which can free-range through pastures (they don't have to be organic nor does the supplementary feed which has bubbled up in price recently -- the US just doesn't grow much organic instead relying on other countries so organic is bonus). Purchases can often be done via the Farmers Markets, or Co-Ops or even through Community Supported Agriculture.

However the egg that can't be beat (fortunately not literally) is one from your own yard. It's legal in a great many cities to keep a few hens. The cities include New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Madison, and many more plus new ones every month or so. They eat kitchen scraps, aerate lawns and gardens and produce great fertilizer. It's amazing the depth of personality a chicken can have so not only do they double as great pets but cheep entertainment too. :)

I really like this post on raising a micro-flock as it was the first to really get me thinking it could be done (there's a couple girls two blocks away and I'm taking them some turnip tops today). There's also a great link to understanding egg carton claims there from brown eggs to feed to omegas to hormones and antibiotics; however the picture they have of a battery cage hen is of a particularly healthy and not representative. The Humane Society themselves at their posting about the differences in caged versus uncaged has a better picture that better reflects reality for these poor birds yet isn't a gross picture as so many can be since these ladies spend a year or two in a wire cage with several others and less than a notebook paper size space to move around in before they are gassed for the next crew (sorry, my soapbox tripped me up again). It really is a miserable existence including having their feet grow into the wires and having their feathers rubbed off for being so closely packed in not to mention the ammonia of the buildings where thousands of their mates are also stuck in with them.

For a great 4 minute video on what a pastured operation is really like check out the Edible Portland blog. They featured a co-op. In the UK free-range actually means something and it is something like a cross between what it means here and what Pastured is for the girls in the video. Pastured is far healthier for the eater as well.

Here's another fun post on whether fresh eggs can be stored without refrigeration. The consensus I've found is that natural eggs have a coating that seals off the pores of the egg which gets washed off in production (the egg then usually gets a corn-based coating after a corn-based wash) so you don't want to leave supermarket eggs out for any time but from the farm unwashed they should be fine for at least several hours (I've heard of farmers finding an errant nest of a dozen for a broody hen and the eggs were all fine). The one thing about very fresh eggs is that they do not peel well when hard boiled. That is indeed a sign of freshness.

After seeing the pictures and the video it should be pretty explanatory the reasons for the cost differences. To give you the short answer to your question though, likely organic is the better of the two you had because organic already implied cage-free.

I don't drink either! Just some cold water, please!

Beer. Ale specifically. Microbrewed ale more specifically. Red Tail Ale from Mendocino Brewing Company even more specifically. YUM!