Eggs To Dye For

Did I miss my stained-glass window of opportunity? Can I still talk about...Easter egg hunts? I'm still sick and now on antibiotics to deal with the noises in my head...I said "noises"...not "voices"...so you can relax. But at least maybe I have a logical reason I can blame on this delay.

When I was growing up, there wasn't much they talked about that killed you in the food realm...except for mayonnaise. "Don't leave mayonnaise out in the sun...it can kill you." I don't know about you, but the odds of us taking the mayonnaise jar out to play with it as a kid and then decide we were hungry and wanted to have a snack...were pretty much nil. We could eat raw beef, we didn't need to cook our hamburgers until they registered 160 degrees inside...we touched other things after we stuffed the turkey and yes, we actually crammed all that stuffing INSIDE the cavity...and we could have runny eggs without worrying about salmonella.

Not only that...but we could dye them the nite before Easter and have our parents hide them after we went to bed. Oh...anyone over the age of, uh...my age, knows what I'm talking about. It was like a lesser Christmas...but with candy instead of presents...plus we got to play "hide and go seek" with deadly egg products. If only we knew. Why we were so enthused with searching for dyed eggs is beyond me...c'mon it's an egg...this is way before the plastic ones that you hid money in. So...on our expedition we would go...usually right after church in our fancy clothes. And back in my day, that meant wearing my new dress and pastel-coloured coordinated coat, shoes, hat and gloves. Yes, gloves...and of course the dye would rub off on the gloves but it didn't matter as we only wore them once anyway. Along with the hat, coat, shoes and dress.

Okay, so off we went...we were kids on a mission...and if you had siblings, this mission was a big deal. "Must get more eggs than the others." Again...why? I don't know! So...we searched in the house...behind the sofa cushions, under the sofa where the cats and dog routinely played, inside the old Grundig shortwave radio/record player, inside shoes, out in the yard under more unsanitary things...and then we were told to stop...that we found them all...or more often, we just gave up looking. And if we gave up looking, you know what that meant...one day, in the not too distant future...someone will "find" an egg...in some state of science project deterioration...and of course that someone will have to crack it open to look at and smell it...and ask YOU to smell it, too.

So, there we were...with our stash of multi-hued eggs...invariably with shells that cracked in the boiling/dying process the nite before, so when you peeled the shells off, the white was always shades of purple and this awful sickly green colour. Doesn't matter if the egg was red on the outside...the stain inside was always going to be purple and green. A little known fact...PAAS actually stands for "Purple And Awful Sickly green"...well, they left off the "G" as it didn't sound or flow right. Oh I made that up...yes, it's silly, but I am still sick. Actually PAAS was invented by Newark, NJ drug store owner, William Townley. He named it after "Passen" after the word that his Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors used for Easter. So, in a nutshell...or in this case, eggshell...New Jersey trivia to boot.

And then our pre-Easter meal feast commenced. We actually ATE them...well, we ate a couple...the rest got smashed up in a bowl for egg salad with some mayonnaise. That is, AFTER we brought that jar back inside.