TBnJ

For the past few years, we've avoided doing Easter eggs as my body was having very strong reactions to eggs that I prefer to avoid (even though I absolutely love to eat eggs). I still don't seem to be able to eat the chicken's eggs without a reaction, but I think we may be able to cook the eggs around me for the kids with out a problem. We're still not sure. More experimenting is needed.

But anyway, on Sunday morning, I made a dozen hard-boiled eggs. There are some good sites on dying Easter eggs naturally, but I wasn't overly ambitious this year. I decided to go for the easiest possible route. Next year we can get more creative and involved. Or maybe we'll dye eggs again this summer for fun. But we skipped the "boil the natural thing for 20-30 minutes" part of the directions. We weren't doing any of the onion skins or red cabbage or anything. I just went for simple. In the glass jars above, you see tumeric and water, paprika and water, and grape juice and water. I put about one to two teaspoons of the spices in each jar (not a highly accurate scientific measure!). I have no idea how much grape juice I put in, but I diluted it by about 50% with water. The kids throughly mixed up the "dyes" and water. Those are quart jars, and they each have four eggs in them. They probably could have held six eggs each. We stuck the jars in the fridge for 24 hours to let the dyes set.

To pattern some of the eggs, we put rubberbands on them. J made the purple egg at left in the center of the plate that came out best (and darkest, though it was on the top of the jar). She had four rubberbands on it. The rubberbands require some patience to get on the eggs; B struggled with it. A few of the other eggs came out mottled from the seasonings in the water. The grape juice definitely worked the best. The dark yellow eggs are the tumeric. The pale brown eggs are the paprika. That was the least successful. We probably won't do it again, but we will do the tumeric and grape juice.

The kids had lots of fun doing it but would have liked to do more patterns. Next time we definitely will try some experiments with cheesecloth and herbs or other edible flowers. We'll also do more rubberbands since that did work well. T also wants to try double dyeing the eggs after we've taken the rubberbands off, so we may attempt that, too.

Labels: around the house, recipes