Because of my bent toward kitchen experiments, our love of botanical and veggies, and my concern about food coloring in general, we went back to vegetable dyed eggs this year. I used the information from a variety of sources but loved the marbled eggs I
"pinned." We used that technique and the one in
a linked blog from the same source. We will use even more of these ideas next year!
Here are the pics and the "how" is at the end!
 |
| This egg is wrapped with cilantro, cabbage, and onion skins - it's Hannah's and turned out so pretty |
 |
| Here's our sweet friend Hannah |
 |
| Sunshine and Tink - we also used berries |
 |
| The boys. Don't they look thrilled? |
 |
| Pepper |
 |
| Beets |
 |
| Spinach - the Littles had a blast tearing it up |
 |
| Cabbage - the kids tore this up too |
|
 |
| Tumeric - gritty but pretty! |
 |
| Waiting is fun at first |
 |
| Then it got boring |
 |
| Sunshine after ball practice |
 |
| Aren't they lovely? |
 |
| The middle one is tea -- it does have color! |
|
It was messy and took about twice as long as the scary tablet way. But it was more fun and we are so happy with the unusual look we will do it again next year with a few changes.
In the end, we went with the following recipe, garnered from several places on the web:
2 to 3 cups vegetable matter (see the end)
2 cups water
1 teaspoon alum
2 tablespoons white vinegar (added at the end so it doesn't cook off)
Cook the first three together a long time, 14 to 30 minutes. When done, strain and add the vinegar.
Beets: for a light redish pink --they really don't get very dark. Next time I will try cooking them 45 minutes or pressure cooking them.
Cabbage: Use red cabbage for blue; it's lovely.
Onion skins: we have used them in the past but only used them as decoration today (I'm allergic)
Spinach:
Never again. It did not work and we cooked it forever.
Tumeric powder: 2 tsps to 2 cups water. Such a pretty yellow.
Strong tea: 2 tea bags to 1 cup water will yield eggs about the color of brown eggs. But we like it!
