Easter baskets are prepared, except Easter Bunny is over baskets and switched to lunch bags. The lunch bags are tied with a simple six foot length of ribbon and deposited at the front door of each apartment on my floor plus a few others on different floors sprinkled around randomly.
I was afraid I'd be busted making the deliveries, but at 4:30 am, I went unnoticed.
A spice mixture is prepared. The sort of thing I like on my own eggs. Tiny envelopes are fashioned filled with the spice mixture and labeled, "EGG SPICES."
* sea salt
* freshly cracked pepper
* garlic powder
* coriander
* cumin
* cayenne
It's like halloween except religious. I have no idea who the people are receiving these bags. I don't care if they are Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, atheist, agnostic, vegan, allergic to chocolate, repulsed by marshmallow, angry bitter old farts, thieves, they're having an Easter bag in front of their door.
Since I learned the joys of pressure-cooking eggs I feel comfortable presenting them with the certain knowledge that they will be easy to peel. Pressure-cooking thirty eggs is easy as pressure-cooking one egg.
I dyed them once when I was a little kid and recall that being a total blast. We made a proper mess of things. I relived those precious moments by using the same dye kit. The kits haven't changed a bit. You still get six tiny color tablets that bubble like Alka-Seltzer™.
Making all the little envelopes was sort of a drag. Maybe I should have made them bigger. There could be no leakage whatsoever. they contained about a 1/3 teaspoon spice mixture.
These are my own tiny boxes of chocolate ↓ that I give to people. Each box contains usually seven mint-size chocolate pieces.
Dove bar chocolate ↓.
These come from the bins at Whole Foods. ↓ Their wrappers are like little globes.
This is ginger candy ↓ also from the bins at Whole Foods.
It was kind of cool having the basket hay for the eggs because that meant I didn't have to be so careful.
Easter Bunny delivery truck ↓.
I know there's still some sand left in my eye, but are those Egyptian Hieroglyphs that you've drawn individually on those boxes? Your neighbors must love your early morning Easter ritual. And the idea of including egg spices....????...totally out of this world creative. You never cease to amaze!
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter,
Sultry
Happy Easter. Care to share your pressure-cooker technique for hard-cooked eggs? I've tried everything including sous vide at 167 for an hour, and I'm still looking for the optimal solution.
ReplyDeleteSultry, I did not draw those hieroglyphics. I downloaded a suitable image before I began studying them seriously. The image was resized and adjusted to fit a template drawn on another layer in Photoshop. I keep a Photoshop file for large and small boxes on my hard-drives. Printing, cutting out, and gluing the boxes is a major pain in the butt. That's the thing that takes the fun out of it, mostly because of the printers.
ReplyDeleteI don't know anything about my neighbors. I've only ever spoken to three of them. The woman across the hall totally blows me off. I have no idea what they think. I'm hoping for massive confusion.
Rob, my pressure cooker goes to 15LB and has two red lines. I read in Cooking for Geeks that commercial egg places pressure cook at 7.5 LBs pressure for ease of peeling. Here in Denver hard-boiled eggs are always ALWAYS ALWAYS perfect bastards to peel. The idea is to shock them. My first trial was warm eggs (as I usually do) 8 minutes at between 7.5 -10 LBS pressure. One of the eggs cracked open while cooking. The others peeled very easily. Then I remembered the point was to shock them so the second time I put them in cold for 8.5 minutes at constant 7.5LB pressure. The yolks were slightly not fully hard. I liked them, but probably unsuitable for Easter eggs. This batch was cold from refrigerator, 10 minutes exactly at constant 7.5 LBs. They are fully cooked and very easy to peel.
Incidentally, when I mentioned this first trial to Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks he wrote back within three minutes. He told me he posted on his Twitter and his Facebook account a link to the page I wrote. Apparently he has a lot of friends because that page was instantly flood with thousands of visits. I'm still getting visits to that page from Facebook.
Vielen dank. I'll give it a try.
ReplyDelete