I’m a little uncomfortable saying this here, but…
I’m a 25 year old male, and I want to color Easter eggs. So badly, in fact, that I’m considering hijacking my guitarist’s kid and coloring eggs with her. I’m pathetic and less than manly, but there it is.
I’m a 24 year old male, and I never even considered not coloring eggs. This despite the fact that I usually don’t eat them. I just like coloring them. I will think up intricate color patterns that look impressive but drive me insane because they’re nearly impossible to create.
I just break out the eggs I colored a few years ago for a centerpiece.
They are ‘blown’ and dried of course.
Some are painted, some are dyed. A few I ‘Martha Stewarted’ using colors from the kitchen and grasses from the yard. Get your egg dye in a cup and add grasses and ferns. Some of the ferny looking designs will end up on the egg. Red cabbage makes a great robins egg blue tint.
I get really nostalgic at the smell of boiling vinegar.
Flyp, stop trying to show us your supposed “sensitive” side. We all know about your little forays into community parks on Easter to smash the little tike’s hidden eggs.
Demo, you wound me to the quick! I have never undertaken such base deeds! And at the expense of the young and innocent of heart…
(Shut the fuck up, boat boy, you’re messing up my game.)
Actually, while it probably is a sensitive-sounding OP, I really do want to color eggs. Badly.
I love coloring Easter eggs! I always set out with an extensive design plan - wax crayon and tape for different stripes, one of the cool egg holders for optimal drying conditions…but they all ended up looking like a 9 yr old did them. But that never stops me. Now I have a nephew I can indoctrinate, er, introduce to the wonderful world of vinegar and wax.
This morning I saw a good tip for coloring eggs from the White House chef. Instead of boiling and then dyeing, he said to boil the eggs in water, vinegar and food coloring. Of course this only works if you want eggs that are one color and don’t have the wax/tape treatment. I think we all know I won’t be testing this tip.
I don’t just color eggs for Easter. I color them whenever I get bored with plain white eggs. Sometimes I draw little tiny underwear on them with crayons and then dye them various politically correct multi-ethnic skin tones (although to be honest, pink is just easier, and I pretend they got sunburned). I do this even to the raw ones, so making an omlette at my house has a certain "human sacrifice " kind of overtone. And don’t even get me started on food coloring in mashed potatoes, especially when unsuspecting friends are coming for dinner. Or drawing faces on the cherry tomatoes in the salad, sort of horribly surprised expressions that seem to say, “Please don’t bite me, please, no, NO, AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH…”
Ahh, seawitch, you are the only other person who seems to share my joy of dying plain old neutral coloured food. Once when I was in high school I peeked at the dinner cooking on the stove (Among other things, there was rice and gravy) hmmmm, I thought, this is just too boring. So the gravy became sky blue and the rice became hot pink. I returned the lids to the pots, cleaned up the food colouring and went back into the living room.
Mom was not happy.
My dad saw the humour in it and retaliated by moving my car to a new parking spot a few blocks away and putting a pumpkin in the car’s parking space. Apparently this was something he had always wanted to do.
Oh yeah, I’ve also written stuff on eggs, too. It started out as a fairly practical, hints from Heloise kind of thing - if the eggs went into the egg holding thingy in the fridge you’d toss the carton with the expiry date on it, right?
But soon I’d start writing weird messages on them to other members of the household, etc.
Now that you mention it, I could definitely deal with dying easter eggs. I haven’t done that since I was about 8…and I’m 19 now. So I have lots of eggs to make up for…
The neatest egg I ever saw wasn’t made anywhere near easter time. We were at another couple’s house for dinner, and she loves to experiment with new recipes. She made chinese tea eggs, or something like that. They were hardboiled eggs with the shells cracked, but still remaining on the egg, then soaked for several hours in tea. The color soaked through into the egg white, and they came out with a marbled pattern - too cool!
We have my sister and her little Ralflings visiting us this weekend, and we’re going to dye eggs this afternoon or evening. I think I’ll try this with a few eggs, if they’ll let me. (Durn wimmen never let us men into the kitchen. I say that the job of cleaning up afterwards is a small price to pay for letting us explore our creative sides!)