Happy Easter!

Happy (belated) Easter everyone!

Being away from home for yet another holiday, I chose to spend part of my day doing what I loved to do when I was a kid: decorate Easter eggs.

I did this last year with my roommate using flowers, nylons and onion peels.  Sound weird? I can promise you the results were amazing:

This year I wanted to do something a little bit different.  So instead of using onion peels, I used 7 different all natural food dyes.  Not all of them worked amazingly well, but it was a fun experiment in natural egg coloring.

Check 'em out...

From left to right:
* cranberries + strawberries
* some tea from Trader Joes called Red rooibos.
* grated carrots + few pieces canteloupe
* turmeric
* zaatar + basil (I'd read spinach can work, but I didn't have any so tried basil instead)
* blueberries
* paprika

For all of them I basically just boiled the ingredient in ~1+ cups water, let it steep for 15+ minutes, and added ~ 1 TBSP worth of vinegar.  Poured the liquid into glasses and added my pre-hard boiled eggs.

So how did they turn out?? Well, after ~20+ minutes, here are the results.

Meh, not bad. But not super great either.  Of all of the eggs the zaatar/basil one was the worst, with almost no color (so I didn't include it in the picture below).  Most of the rest got a very pale pastel color. The three brightest (last three eggs shown below) were the turmeric (yellow), blueberries (bluish purple) and paprika (a reddish brown)

I think they could have been a lot brighter had I done what I did last year: boil the eggs IN the colored liquid.  This time the eggs were simply placed in the liquid and allowed to sit for a while. So I'm guessing less heat = less color.

After that mini-experiment I wanted to repeat what I'd done last year, using flowers for patterns. Instead of nylon this year I had to use some tulle I had laying around (no nylons) and it worked pretty well, although probably not quite as well as nylons.  For the full instructions, check out last years post.  Today I just provide you with some pretty pictures.

Sometimes the eggs pre-coloring look prettier than post-coloring.


Taking a little swimmy swim in the blueberry juice

Some of my favorite eggs (yes, I play favorites.)  The turmeric and paprika eggs at right. And it's amazing: all four eggs on the left were put in the blueberry liquid, some in the same container for the same amount of time. But all of them came out a little differently.  Weird.

The egg at front was my favorite.  [It's the same egg in the pre-color flower picture shown above (at left)]

Hopefully soon I'll actually get to celebrate a big holiday with my family.  I'm counting down the days until my next trip home to Chicago (just over a month).  I haven't been home in over 6 months- that's a record breaker for me! 

Happy holidays and family days everyone.

Buen Provecho,
Jackie

Comments

  1. LOVE the eggs!!
    Hope we can get together when you're in town :)

    ReplyDelete

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