Leftover Eggs? Try This Broccoli Ring

I’ve always loved coloring eggs for Easter. I was one of the little kids in the grocery store begging my mom for the latest and greatest version of dye kits. As I grew to a bigger kid, I wanted to experiment with crayons and strings and oil and all kinds of things to make my eggs unique. And even though I knew there’d be no kids around this year, no grandkids to fuss over, I still wanted to mess around with the eggs. Nothing like the aroma of vinegar in the air! Smells like Easter!

This year, I took the adult, even green, route and decided I’d try my hand at coloring with natural dyes. I’d read a couple different articles (one from Fine Cooking, one from Prevention) and decided I had enough of the suggested items to make my experiment worthwhile. At least for making egg salad sandwiches afterward.

The directions sounded simple enough: Take 4 cups of chopped or mashed fruit or veggie matter, or 4 tablespoons of spices, and cover with 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil, add 2 tablespoons vinegar (I’m guessing any kind will do) and simmer for 30 minutes. Then add your eggs and let them steep in the refrigerator several hours or overnight, turning occasionally, and you’ll end up with a veritable rainbow of egg colors.

Because I’ve been trying to maintain a compost pile, I save my kitchen scraps and I’d had some onion skins, so I set them aside for my experiment. I was intrigued by the possibilities of colors. Some of them were pretty obvious: spinach got you green eggs, grape juice, purple, coffee or tea, beige. With chili powder you got orange; with turmeric or cumin, bright yellow. There was one big surprise, though: red cabbage made blue eggs! I wish I would have had some.

What I did have were onion skins, a mix of red and yellow. I only had about two cups, so I halved the recipe, enough for half a dozen eggs, more than enough for me and my husband. The picture shows you the result: a kind of marbled yellow brown. I wrapped rubber bands around the eggs before dipping. They would have looked really cool if I’d dipped them into another color afterwards.

I declared the experiment a success and will start earlier next Easter. Then I really will have too many eggs. We often have eggs on tossed salads or will just eat a couple hard-cooked eggs for a quick lunch. Growing up, my mother always garnished cooked spinach with hard-cooked eggs and vinegar. And I really do like egg salad. My husband could eat deviled eggs every day, I think.

One recipe that makes good use of too many hard-cooked eggs and one that I’ve often made is a broccoli ring, a savory gelatin salad. I used to think that all gelatin salads were sweet and fruity so this one caught my attention a long time ago and has remained a staple, a back-of-the-shelf staple, but a favorite of mine nevertheless.

Broccoli Ring

1 pound fresh broccoli, cooked and chopped
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1 14 ½ ounce can beef broth
¾ cup mayonnaise
4 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon lemon juice
½ teaspoon salt
hot sauce, if desired
4 hard-cooked eggs, chopped

In medium saucepan, soften the gelatin in the broth. Stir over low heat till the gelatin is dissolved. Remove from heat. Stir in the mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, salt and hot sauce, to taste. Fold in drained broccoli and chopped eggs. Pour into a 5 ½ cup ring mold. Cover and chill several hours or overnight until firm. To serve, unmold onto lettuce lined plate, and garnish center with cherry tomatoes, additional lettuce and broccoli buds. Makes 10 servings.

Broccoli

The Mystery of the Hard-Boiled Egg

You’d hardly think that something as simple as how to hard-boil an egg would cause much discussion, but in my little corner of the world, it has.

Here’s the scoop: For my entire life, I’ve made hard-boiled eggs – successfully, I need to add – the same way. I put eggs in a pan, cover with water, put on the stove. When the water comes to a boil, I turn off the heat, and let the eggs sit, covered, for 20 minutes. When they’re cool, I peel them.

Never a problem. Not until Dude’s eggs. One of the advantages of living in the jingle berries, aside from the peace and quiet, is getting fresh eggs from a great neighbor like Dude. Dude is a 70-something farmer who lives down the road and he’s been called Dude ever since he was seven or eight. (He can’t remember who christened him that or why but it stuck.) We started getting eggs from Dude’s chickens regularly a few months ago. They really are richer somehow; the yolks are more yellow and they seem to have more flavor, without any doctoring.

I know that fresh eggs are more difficult to peel when hard-boiled, and so when I was planning to make one of my husband’s favorite treats – pickled eggs – I let the eggs sit in the refrigerator for a good week or so to age them a bit before trying to cook them. But when I did, oh, they were so-o-o-o hard to peel. Seemed to take forever, and the eggs were all pock-marked. Didn’t hurt the flavor of the pickled eggs any; they just looked funny.

When I reported my misadventure to Dude, he told me that he’d never had a problem, even though his cooking method was similar. There are a couple slight differences: He’d let them sit a whole day in the warm water, then he'd put them in the fridge overnight. The next day, he would peel them. Now Dude really has only been cooking a lot in the past few years since his wife passed away, but I knew he knew what he was doing.

One day, he told me that he’d had a bunch of extra eggs, so he thought he’d hard-boil a dozen for me. The next day, he – untypically – called in the middle of the day, sounding a little frustrated and left a message saying, “Gotta bunch of torn-up eggs for you down here, if you want ‘em.”

Turned out that he’d had the same trouble I’d had this time. He even enlisted his grandson to help him peel the little devils, and Chas got frustrated, too: “This is going to take a long time, Papa.”

So I decided to research a bit and after Googling “how to hard-boil farm fresh eggs” I learned a lot. Some recommendations said, after starting the same way I usually did, to put the cooked eggs into ice water for a minute or two, like blanching vegetables, then back into simmering water for another minute or two. There were several recommendations using an ice water bath. One piece of advice was to add ¼ cup vinegar to the cooking water and boiling for 30 minutes. But I decided to trust the advice of the American Egg Board, and I learned all sorts of other things about eggs to boot – how to be sure to avoid the green stuff (don’t cook too long), how to center the yolk (lay the eggs on their side in the fridge). The egg board also says they're really hard cooked not hard-boiled, because boiling toughens them too much.

I’ve got a dozen pickled eggs right now, so it will be a while before I need them. But the eggs in my refrigerator are going to sit there until Easter before I even try again.