Easter Eggs

As long as I can remember we colored Easter eggs. In Poland Easter was extremely important as a religious holiday.  It was the same when we were children.  We didn't receive colorful Easter baskets full of toys and candy and new Easter clothes.  We lined a plate with fresh moss, decorated it with spring flowers and set it out.  The next morning, when we came home from church, we found it full of colored eggs with perhaps one or two chocolate Easter candies.  Our home always had an Easter Lily and a poppy seed roll on the table. We kids spent the day between playing with our Easter eggs and eating them.  We made ramps and rolled our eggs to see whose egg was the fastest.  Before we ate them, we lined up our eggs, point to point and rammed them together to see whose egg was the strongest.  The egg that broke first was the one eaten.
Of course, we took turns hiding eggs and finding them.  Every clump of fresh grass or new daffodils had an egg hidden.  As we got older we became very creative in coloring them ourselves. 

One of our favorite ways of coloring eggs is to marble them using bowls of hot water, vinegar and food coloring (use the directions on the box of food dye) with a few teaspoons of salad oil added to the dye.

Every egg comes out different.  These were only dipped in two or three colors each and weren't left in very long.  The longer they stay in the dye, the more intense the colors become.  In the past we've had some look like galaxies in deep space with beautiful swirls of color against very dark backgrounds.  We've been making marbled eggs for many years and they always come out pretty and different.

We like to celebrate Easter with ham, traditional potato salad, sour cream cucumbers, and pickled beets with eggs:

This is a recipe from home also.  Mama heated equal parts vinegar, sugar and beet juice until the sugar dissolved.  If she didn't have quite enough beet juice, she added a little water.  Then she poured that mixture over sliced beets and peeled hard-boiled eggs and let them sit in the refrigerator a few days to allow the flavor to penetrate the beets and the egg whites.  They will keep in the refrigerator a long time.  We only added the eggs at Easter, but we had pickled beets often with our meals or as a snack with a chunk of homemade bread.

This year our Easter bread was actually an Irish Soda Bread.  It was made according to the directions on the bag and was delicious with our ham!  Thanks, again, C&K!