dcorsetto
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Easter Delay - Elephant Town tomorrow!
🕑 Added 2022-04-18 01:54:50 +0000 UTCI spent the weekend preparing for and executing a bomb-ass Easter gathering with my family, wherein I spent several hours working toward the pinnacle of my deviled egg-making career.
To be fair, I made these Peeps eggs by request of my mom a few years back, and I've had to one-up them every year since.
Black peppercorn eyes, carrot beaks, and... licorice eyebrows? Real eyebrows? Who's to know.
This year I dyed my hardboiled eggs overnight, which I thought would be a cinch, but of course I made it complicated by creating five different natural dyes from scratch.
Beets, red onion, turmeric, yellow onion with dandelion, and violets from the yard. The turmeric and beet ones loosely followed the stupidly fancy recipes here (who has cardamom pods on-hand? don't answer that), and the other three were just 1.5 cups water + 1/2 cup vinegar, boiled down with the colorful ingredient, cooled, and poured over the eggs for an overnight bath.
I wish I'd taken a photo of each egg before I cut them in half, but you get the idea here:
(Plot twist: the red onion created the violet egg on the bottom left, and the violets created the blue egg on the right! Exciting tales of intrigue are all I offer you.)
Ramps are in season and I got one of the few bunches at the farmers market this morning (they go FAST, West Virginians go bananas for 'em), so I whipped those in with the filling, put them on a bed of beet greens, and popped a violet (they're edible!) and some spring onions on top of each one.
I felt like wretched monster beheading the violets, and apologized to every flower as I did.
Luke's meal was gone too fast to get photos, but he spent all morning braising a lamb shoulder with radishes and it was gone minutes after it was out of the oven. (Shameless link to our favorite West Virginian butcher, whom I snatched the shoulder from the moment the market opened so that Luke could get right to work).
He also made peanut butter cups and cashew-coconut cluster chocolates while the meat was cooking, which are... also pretty much gone. He took a picture before we vultured out on them.
Anyway, I'm telling you all this to excuse this week's Elephant Town pages going up a day late, although that's also partially due to all the chicken wire I decided to include in literally every single panel.
(I just counted, they're not in EVERY panel. Just 13 out of 14 panels, knife emoji knife emoji knife emoji.)
I'll be working on it all day tomorrow! I hope you found yourself in the presence of good family, good friends, and/or alone with good food so that no one else could pry it from your hands.
Edit: OH! And I hid eggs, duh. My parents and brother, like myself, are giant children, in the best kind of way. (The kind of way that drinks a couple bottles of wine and then walks around the yard with little baskets in their hands.)
Comments
Ralph
Ramp season in WV! Makes me miss being a Mountaineer. Your deviled eggs all look ammazing!
Don’t be mad… I have cardamom pods on hand. LOL I rarely use them these days. Those eggs, though. Fantastic.
Pete Jordan
We started in Boston, then up the coast to ME as far as Boothbay Harbor 🦞, across into NH, down over the top of Mt Washington (where the sun shone in clear skies, which I gather is a rare occurrence 🙂), back to MA and Cape Cod as far as P-town, then train from Boston to NYC for a few days, and home. It was a *good* honeymoon!
MaryAnne Glazar
(Almost too pretty to eat but I wouldn't let that stop me)
Those eggs are so beautiful!!
Danielle Corsetto
I kept the leftovers! I figured I'd try painting with them a little, since it couldn't really HURT to just eff around with them (I have no idea what the vinegar would do to paper over time). I might just bring them to figure drawing this week...
Theadora
I presume you've already thrown out these dyebaths, but if/when you do more, you might enjoy re-using them on different materials; they might make different things come out different colors. Nice work!
Danielle Corsetto
Perfect, more for us egg-lovrs.
Yeah I feel like my husband would revolt at the smell!
No! And just reading that made my mouth water XD
Danielle Corsetto
Ahh cool! I wonder if the egg somehow changed the acidity of the violet dye; over the course of a few hours, the color of the dye in the jar went from a mild pinkish-purple to a VERY saturated dark red-purple... only to dye the eggs blue! So wild.
Theadora
Those are all gorgeous! And there are some natural dyes that act like litmus paper, and change color depending on acidity or alkalinity.
Danielle Corsetto
googling "ramp butter" asap
Gary Walker
The correct answer is "NEVER LONG ENOUGH" because there is a limited amount of time in which you can get them and make ramp butter with them.
Gary Walker
I'm absolutely trying this some time. I also <3 deviled eggs and never get to eat them because my wife does not like eggs.
Danielle Corsetto
Hah! I'm not sure how long it goes til, but my friends and neighbors keep a watchful eye on patches of them off the C&O Canal (right across the river) until they're ready, and suddenly people will be walking past you with bucketsful saying "here, have some ramps!" They're kind of a mix between a spring onion and garlic. Which is to say, they're a VERY intense spring onion. ;) And you can eat the whole thing, much more mild at the green end of course! What parts of New England did y'all honeymoon in?
Danielle Corsetto
Have I ever made you mine?? These ones were the BEST because they were brined in vinegar overnight, I'm definitely doing that from now on!
Danielle Corsetto
Aww, dog violets! Yeah they're awfully showy little things. I figure they're compensating for their size. ;)
Danielle Corsetto
Ahaha if you ever find yourself out here, remind me and I will make the MEANEST (nicest) deviled eggs for ya!
Pete Jordan
How long is the ramp season? I ask because just over 23 years ago Mac and I were on our honeymoon in New England and heard a piece on the car radio that (then) mystified us completely; people blathering on about ramps for best part of an hour without ever once explaining wtf the things were… We didn't actually find out until we were back in the uk, in those days of no Google or smartphones 🙂
*DROOL* I love devilled eggs!
Gary Walker
I adore the dog violets all over my yard this time of year. Just obnoxiously beautiful flowers. https://www.instagram.com/p/CcIii9ELk4i/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Dean Reilly
Now I want to eat those eggs. 😭
NJGR
I grew up in Illinois where the state flower is the violet. I remember taking walks and eating violet leaves when I was in elementary school! Also, do you need a sister? 'Cause your Easter sounds awfully creative and I love it! 😉
Minzoku Bokumetsu
oh dang those look amazing, now I want to make them =o
Hugh Eckert
Yum! I love ramps! That all looks really good... glad I didn't see this until after dinner.
Serious works of art - not sure they should be eaten...
