Dixmont woman releases egg cookbook

DIXMONT, Maine (WABI) - A Dixmont woman is cooking her way to the top of Amazon’s book lists.

Lisa Steele has been around chickens since she was a little girl growing up by her grandparents’ farm.

After working on Wall Street, she and her husband moved to Virginia where she started raising her own chickens and ducks.

“I needed something to throw myself into, and this was perfect, and I didn’t really start it as a business. I just started it as something I love, and it just sort of right time, right place, and people were interested in chickens and my message, and it just kind of snowballed into the book and social media,” said Steele.

That’s how Fresh Eggs Daily came to be.

In 2015, she and her husband packed up their animals and moved to a small farm in Dixmont.

“It’s been super reassuring to know that we’ll always have eggs. We have a garden so we can grow our own vegetables, you know, not being completely dependent on someone else for our food,” said Steele.

Steele has written six books about the care and keeping of ducks and chickens, including a children’s book called “Let’s Hatch Chicks!”

“It’s the story of Violet, one of my chickens who wants to be a mom, so she decides one spring to sit on eggs and hatch them,” said Steele.

Her newest endeavor started right before the pandemic: a cookbook all about eggs.

Since it was published this year, it’s been chosen as an Amazon Editor’s Pick and Book of the Week and debuted in the top 50 cookbooks on Amazon.

“There’s sweet recipes, there’s savory recipes, there’s cocktails, there’s condiments, there’s just so much you can do with eggs,” she said.

While Steele is partial to raising the eggs at home, if you do buy them from a store, she has some tips.

“All the cartons and all the words and it’s super confusing, a lot of them are meaningless. Farm fresh and natural and those kind of things, they’re just marketing terms. If you really care about the chicken that laid those eggs, and if they were happy, as reasonably happy as they could be, you want to look for humane, pasture raised,” said Steele.

As for cooking the perfect egg? She says it’s easier than you think.

“Try to get the freshest eggs you can, and then eggs cook super fast, so you want to cook them really slowly on low heat, and you should be fine,” she said.

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