Suzanne's Mom's Blog

When I made an absent-minded mistake with the egg coloring this year, it occurred to me that misadventures at Easter are sort of a family tradition. For some reason, we like to try new things for this holiday. That’s good. But our adventures frequently lead to hilarious results.

I remember the time our Philadelphia niece and nephew were visiting, and we decided to make bunny cookies from a recipe Suzanne got at Girl Scouts. Barbara went to add milk. The recipe said 2 Tablespoons. She thought it said 2 cups — and, oops! How we laughed!

We turned the cookie batter into something we referred to as “fritters.”

The family has also had lots of experiments with egg-decorating. We’ve tried dipping two sides separately for two-toned eggs; blowing out the raw insides before marbleizing with oil paint floating on water in a bucket; and making Ukrainian wax-resist eggs. Even before John grew up and founded a company that involved visits to Ukraine and employing Ukrainians, he thought we could get Ukrainian egg-decorating instructions and just sit down and do it.

He sat down and did it. I have to say that experiment wasn’t bad.

But I want to tell you about 2021. After not going in a grocery store for a year, I was thrilled to enter at last, and I went looking for white eggs and the Paas coloring kits. The guy who was stocking announced with regret that there were no kits available this year, not even food coloring.

I was floored. But I remembered that one year we made egg dyes with vegetables, so I bought a red cabbage and a beet and went online. One website also suggested tumeric. In three pots, I boiled cabbage for blue, beets for pink, and tumeric for yellow. The tumeric was impossible to strain thoroughly in my strainer and made the yellow eggs all lumpy. (See above.) Plus I forgot the vinegar to set it. The shredded beets worked fine and we ate the leftover beets at dinner.

But I had to do the cabbage twice, and here’s why. The cabbage was the first ingredient I strained after boiling had created a dye. I held the strainer in one hand and the cooled-off pot in the other.

And in true Easter tradition, I poured the dye right down the drain!