When I saw the posting for Martha Stewart’s Easter Egg craft using foods as colourful dyes, I knew we had to try it. My son who is 7 was excited to get crafty and we decided to use beets, red cabbage and turmeric to make the dyes. Martha’s blog has an excellent colour-coding chart to show how to get the colours that you want and how long to let the eggs sit in the dye. Pretty soon my daughters (age 12 and 10) were making their own creations with some fantastic ideas. Using stickers that had strong adhesion and interesting shapes, they were able to create white designs on the eggs by placing them on the egg and then putting the egg in the dye. To get the white coloured, we removed the sticker after the first dye then put the egg in a second dye. There are so many possibilities. Not wanting to waste foods, we used some hard-boiled eggs and some hollowed eggs and reserved the whites and yolk for an afternoon omelette and kept the beets and cabbage to add to a stew for dinner tonight. However, the hollowed eggs float and are hard to get a strong colour.
Traditional holiday crafts and foods have been adapted well so that people with sensitivities and those striving to eat and exist more mindfully can take part. Growing-up in a Jewish home, I always looked forward to Passover and eating matzo. As I identified gluten as a strong sensitivity about 6 years ago, I haven’t had it or some other traditional foods since. This year I went on-line to see if I could track down a gluten-free matzo recipe or if there was a product already made and I found it! Next year, we will give it a try.
Raising our kids in a mixed-marriage, whole-foods, naturopathic-minded house means that they are exposed to many new and different foods that maybe their friends at school are not. Protein shakes, baked kale, gluten-free desserts and quinoa are common foods around here yet are new to many friends of our kids that come over for a meal or sleep-over. It is odd for them to see a house without milk in the fridge or ice cream in the freezer but I’m hopeful that the excitement about good, healthy options will carry home to their families too.
Anyway, getting back to the eggs – I hope that this post didn’t come too late and that naturally dyed eggs will be decorating tables over this long weekend. I added a teaspoon of salt as was recommended in the comments to hold the colour. And as I am learning all of the time, there are always adaptations and options for people who eat differently than others. Usually a quick Internet search will lead you to substitutions or alternative recipes so enjoy!
