Recently I have felt a fairly strong pull to do things a little slower, more natural, and from scratch. Why buy it when we can make it? Why purchase something new when we can find a great version second hand? Essentially, I’m very intrigued by the homesteading lifestyle but I also recognize that I’m going to have to approach it slowly, one step at a time, or I’ll get overwhelmed and quit. So, we have randomly been incorporating some slower living ideas into our daily lives. For example, making butter, buying less processed food, moving away from paper waste, baking bread, etc.
We did take a fairly large leap recently at Easter with our tradition of dying eggs! Instead of buying the standard egg dye, I decided to make our own with a variety of foods and spices. To everyone’s surprise, it was quite fun and worked well! Though, be prepared, your home might stink a bit and it does take several hours…but it’s still fun!
Supplies
- As many white eggs to boil as you like! (I gave mine a nice little ice bath after boiling and it worked!)
- A couple stock pots (just so I could have two going at a time)
- Several large, wide mouth mason jars (to store the eggs as they dye)
- Vinegar (a tablespoos per round)
- Salt (a pinch for each as well)
Thankfully, the process to make the dye is essentially the same regardless of the vegetable or spice used.
For vegetables and large herbs (i.e. beets, cabbage, onion skins):
- Roughly chop them into around 2-3 cups and toss into your stock pot.
- Cover with water and bring to a boil.
- Let simmer for 30-45 minutes, remove from heat and then strain out the chunks
- As your dye cools, add in 1 tablespoon of vinegar and a pinch of salt
For spices or powdered ingredients (i.e. coffee, turmeric):
- Bring two cups of water to boil
- Toss in 1 tablespoon of your spice, 1 tablespoon of white vinegar and 1 pinch of salt
- Let simmer for 10 minutes before removing from heat
Now for the fun part: very carefully place your eggs into the mason jars and pour in your dye to fully cover the eggs. You should let them soak anywhere from 1 hour to 24 hours in the fridge, depending on how vibrant you would like the end results. I opted for roughly 8 hours soaking.
Here is how each experiment went:
The beets, cabbage, turmeric, and yellow onion skins all went so well. The blue from the cabbage was my favorite! The coffee eggs were a last minute call. I was about to toss my used coffee grounds in the compost when I thought…this could be golden eggs instead! It actually worked! I think the blueberries would have worked better if I had more of them but that was all we had that morning, so I gave it a try!
The real test was the following day to see if any of the taste was different when we used the eggs for potato salad and deviled eggs. Good news, it did not!
We really enjoyed this process…me probably most! Even though the house smelled ripe throughout the process, it was fun to experiment! We will definitely do this again next year…maybe with the windows opened!