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Easter eggs, part 2

Submitted by Blog - Henriette on 2 March, 2006 - 10:00
Blog categories: 
Recipes

I like eating my food, not throwing it away.

I have a deadline for the "let's dye eggs with all kinds of foodstuffs" article now -- you remember, it's the one I talked about last year.

So I bought white eggs (not my normal OG brown ones), and lots of things to dye them with.

And I don't like to throw away good food. You dye the eggs by boiling them for a few hours with your food substance of choice and a bit of vinegar, and I'm not at all sure that the result is edible.

I'll be testing the edibility, of course, but meanwhile there's three, no four, blown eggs in the pan. Fry'em up, hmmm, there's something missing ... so I added some chopped-up bacon.

And realized, too late, that that's the wrong way around: you want to fry the bacon first, and add the blown eggs later. That way you get crisp nice bacon with almost soft eggs, instead of too soft bacon with rather too hard eggs.

Oh well, I have lots more eggs, and I'll do things the right way around tomorrow.

Later today it'll be "let's chop up and fry lots of red'n'yellow onions and put them into the freezer" day, cos I need the onion peels.

Today or tomorrow will be the "let's peel a lot of golden delicious apples" day, cos I need the peel to dye eggs. Dunno if there'll be any need to freeze peeled cored sliced-up apple, though: I expect that the apple will disappear fast enough.

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Related entries: Easter egg colors - Egg colors

Comments

Submitted by daubermaus (not verified) on 6 March, 2006 - 00:18.

"Butter Eggs" are made by low simmering eggs for 2to 3 hours. Makes the whites almost brown and the yolk pretty green. Mash with fork, mustard, mayo, and spices. It might be an aquired taste - I grew up on it. But it lets you dye the eggs and have a use for them afterwards.

Also, you can crockpot those onions for about 4 hours with just a bit of water, they carmelize nicely and you only have to slice them coarsely.

Real cinnamon or chili powder for a red/brown.

Submitted by jr (not verified) on 6 March, 2006 - 03:15.

Hmm...

Normally, I'm used to dying eggs by using colored vinegar. Mind you, it should be fairly simple to extract the color from whatever spice or item you wish (rhubarb comes to mind as a rather nice source of a purply red, but you're far more knowledgeable about these sorts of things than I am). The vinegar penetrates the porous shell far better than straight water does.

I also know that there's a fairly strong tradition for "painting" the blown eggshells with layers of wax and dye (dye lightest to darkest colors, applying wax to the parts you want "fixed").

Sorry to hear about the bacon. For what it's worth, I like to cook up a batch of crisp bacon and keep it handy for stuff like this. Smoked turkey also works surprisingly well (for those not into crispy pig bits), and cooked and refrigerated, it keeps a surprisingly long time. Just be certain to wick away as much grease as you can before storing.

Oh, and by the way? Miner's Lettuce with a dash of feta, crisped bacon bits and roasted pine nuts is darn tasty. Thanks for pointing out the accidental garden.

Submitted by Henriette on 6 March, 2006 - 14:04.

DM: Thanks for the tips!
JR: rhubarb, eh? I'll try that, too. Yep, miner's lettuce is a nice salad veggie.