A quick one, it’s been a hectic week, I even missed posting yesterday, sorry!
Today is Good Friday (as if they make a BAD Friday…). That means Easter is a couple days away. And while I don’t go to church, I know that the proper way to celebrate the resurrection of Christ is to decorate some hard boiled eggs with pretty pastel colors, then play hide and seek with them.
Makes perfect sense to me….
But since our chickens are barely keeping up with my massive egg consumption, we opted
to use quail eggs instead. We’ve colored quail eggs before, but the egg coloring kit we use requires the use of vinegar. We didn’t realize that vinegar peels off the outer layer of the egg, removing all of the fancy speckling that the quail put there.
Not a problem, if you take it into consideration. So we simply soaked the speckling off before we colored the eggs. A simple soak in a 50/50 vinegar and water mixture is enough to loosen the outer coloring, leaving a pristine, creamy white shell behind. Be careful to only soak long enough to let the brown speckles start to slip, then remove it by rinsing under running water.
As you rinse, be careful to not break the shell, it has now been weakened. Then simply hard boil them.
My wife’s method to hard boil eggs is as follows: Put eggs in a single layer into a sauce pan, cover with water, put on stove set at high. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Prepare a bowl of ice water large enough to accommodate the number of eggs you are boiling. Once water comes to a boil, turn temperature down to medium high. When the timer goes off, using a slotted spoon, remove eggs and transfer into ice water. Let cool for 10 minutes. Older eggs peel easier, BTW, as the air pocket inside the egg has time to enlarge.
A side note, I think next time we will hard boil them first, then remove the outer layer. The shells get mighty thin, the wife actually pushed her fingers through a couple eggs as she was rinsing them. Also the boiling after thinning the shells seemed to make them more prone to cracking as they cooked, visible in some of the colored eggs below.
Color them as you see fit. We used good old Paas coloring.
And here is the end result:
Peace,
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