Equinox Eggs

Another vernal equinox has come and gone, and the days are now longer than the nights. Here in the north, anyway. Mum and I dyed eggs... and this year, we did some experimenting with natural colors. Last year we used those little bottles of natural dye like "black currant juice contentrate" and "blueberry concentrate" and such. It merely stained our hands and kept our brown eggs brown, so... this year we did something different.

We got some tips out of The Joy of Cooking. We started with a pot of 3 cups red onion skins in a 3 cup mixture of canned red beet juice and water with 2 tbsp vinegar, brought to a boil and turned down to simmer for half an hour. We hoped this would make red.



We did the same with red cabbage in 3 cups of water plus 2 tbsp vinegar, to make blue:



...and spinach, etc. to make green:



...and we hard-boiled a dozen eggs according to the Cook's Illustrated method of covering them with an inch of water, bringing them to a boil, removing from the heat and covering the pan and letting them sit for 10 minutes, then putting them right into ice water to chill. It doesn't overboil them, which is nice.

The cabbage made a lovely deep purply blue color...



...and the onion skins/beet juice made a brick red liquid...



...and the spinach...



...made pond-water yellow. We strained the liquid into large mugs to dye the eggs in. We got about two cups of liquid for each... fits about two eggs comfortably. So we dropped in the eggs and let them sit in there for about 45 minutes... or something like that, anyway, and they came out looking gawgeous. We tied rubber bands around some of them to make pretty stripes. We'll definitely do this again in the future. Maybe not the spinach, though, since the eggs only got their natural spots accentuated. The blue eggs came out really cool, though. I love dying brown eggs.