Back to Basics

I revel in having daughters (in-law, technically, but I prefer to drop the hyphenated part) who pay attention to how their choices impact the Earth and care about what they put into their bodies. Sharing fundamental values like those makes life not only so much easier but also much richer and more fun. For instance, Tiffany’s decision to get ‘back to basics’ this year vis-à-vis the hallowed tradition of dying Easter eggs.

To hear her tell it, Tiffany read the packaging of a traditional egg coloring kit and was unhappy with the various dyes being used. Never one to be daunted by a little bit of inconvenience for a cause, she harvested the leavings of the veggies from her local farm co-op, Tinicum CSA, which she’d squirreled away in her freezer. Beet tops and yellow onion skins. Spinach, red onion skins, and blueberries. (She knew she’d saved them for a reason!)She even threw in some lavender to try to jazz up the wan coloring of the spinach.

Yes, I got the chance this weekend to dye eggs the old fashioned way. Tiffany slaved away in the kitchen all day boiling, boiling, and boiling again. Going back yet again and reducing the liquid containing the natural colors leeching out of the vegetables and fruits, making it ever more potent.

I was quite surprised by the depth of color yielded by ‘going old school’ and creating natural dyes for the eggs. I think the fan favorite this year, at least, was the rich purple-y blue created by the blueberries.

My photos don’t do these justice – Photo: L. Weikel

I Dropped the Ball

I’ll admit it. Between us, we only had a handful of eggs on the white-ish spectrum. That was poor planning on my part. The vast majority of ova we had available to dye were shades of brown. Eggs that are already naturally more than a tabula rasa make it tough on any dye to assert its full-throated essence on its surface. But the task is especially difficult for naturally created dyes to imprint their unique expression of rainbow energy on brown eggs.

Nevertheless, we persisted.

Luckily, we were able to get an idea of some of the more unique and perhaps more reticent colors by carefully curating which eggs should go in which cups. I regret not taking photos of the coffee cups and bowls filled with these natural elixirs. Some of the colors created were startlingly different than one might expect from its appearance in the cup.

The spinach-lavender concoction teamed up to create a uniquely colored liquid that, when just sitting in the bowl, was murky and slightly pinkish and reminiscent of, well, throw up. But when a nearly white egg soaked in the infusion for a bit, the egg was imbued with a moss green color that made the it resemble a mottled river stone. Lovely!

So this Easter’s shout out goes to my daughter* Tiffany. Thank you for spending all the time it took to lovingly create these healthy, fascinating, back-to-basics natural dyes – and then sharing them (Covid-safely, I might add) with us.

(T-236)