The Dinner Files

The last time I dyed Easter eggs… well, I really couldn’t tell you when it was, exactly. I was the official dyer in our house growing up, however. My dad had exactly zero interest. my brother past age six or so followed suit, and my mom isn’t really into things that make a mess on the kitchen counter. We dyed them as a family when I was little, of course, but once I could oversee things on my own, I was pretty much left to it. My mom would buy me the Paas® box, though, with the crazed bunny on the front and the tablets inside with the bronzed wire holder with which to gently dip the eggs into their colored baths.

I’ve been meaning to try dying eggs with food, for professional reasons, for quite some time. After a wee bit of research I decided on:

Red cabbage for blue

Beets for pink

Tumeric for yellow

Onion skins for orange

Red onions skins for purple-ish

Spinach for green

I also played around with making the dye ahead or just cooking the eggs in the dye. Wasted food is anathema to me. It is bad enough the dye-making food would get tossed; I wanted the eggs themselves to be edible, and deliciously so. They would not be boiled to a rubbery death in order for the dye to take on my watch.

The fairly great successes were the red cabbage, tumeric, and, to a very surprising slightly lesser, beets.

For each start with 4 to 6 cups of water (figure out how much you need to cover 6 eggs in the pot or bowl you’re going to dye them in). Then choose your color:

Blue: Add a small head of red cabbage, shredded, and boil it up for about 15 minutes. Pour into a bowl and let it sit to cool. Strain out the cabbage shreds, stir in 1/4 cup distilled vinegar, and let eggs soak in the cooled mixture until they are nice and robin’s eggy blue.

Yellow: Cover 6 eggs in a medium pot with 4 to 6 cups of water. Add 1 tablespoon tumeric and 1/4 cup distilled vinegar and bring to a boil. Cover, let sit 14 minutes, and remove eggs to an ice bath. You can also boil up the tumeric in water and use as a dye in which to dip eggs, like the red cabbage above, but they will be a less vibrant yellow.

Sort of pink in a mottled, old-fashioned, could-be-mistaken-for-a-stone way: Proceed as with a red cabbage for blue, but use 2 grated red beets. Do not cook the eggs with the beets – you don’t get any color to speak of and you need to fish the eggs out of a real mess.

Curious readers will still be thinking about all those onion skins and spinach and what became of them. I used skins for four onions and boiled them down to get a dye. I tried cooking the eggs in that dye and dyeing them after cooking, all with the same shades of brown results:

Looks like a bought brown eggs, doesn’t it? In fact, this set of 8 includes some dyed with yellow onion skins, some with red onions skins, and some naturally brown eggs. As booty for an Easter egg hunt, they are a bust. As conceptual art, they are magical.

And the spinach? Yeah, that didn’t work. At all. Those all got dyed blue and yellow instead.

Joan Dye Gussow still cooks asparagus the way her mother taught her 40-plus years ago – “sliced on a steep diagonal and sautéed in olive oil” – as she described to a conference of eager listeners in a hotel ballroom in Santa Barbara in January. Gussow had a lot to say to the Edible Institute, and I even wrote a lot of it down, but it was this single comment about asparagus that really stuck with me.

That fact alone should make all public speakers paralyzed with fear of their simultaneous power and utter lack of control.

My take-away, as the magazine editors like to say, was that cooking the same thing over and over is human and natural and good. That it can be profound. It is not necessary to seek out new food experiences to be extremely, deeply, devotedly interested in food. I will feel no shame about the fact that I cook this sautéed asparagus – putting a bit of oil in the pan, tossing in minced garlic and ginger to sizzle, adding asparagus and chopped green onion, sprinkling on some salt, stirring the whole thing up, covering the pan until the asparagus is a bit tender – over and over and over again every spring (frequently tossing it onto a bowl of rice with a bit of pork alongside) and expect my family to be not just grateful but exuberantly so.

If anyone out there is re-doing their kitchen I have one piece of advice: for the love of all that is holy, do not go with black granite for your counters.

We inherited ours from the previous owners of our humble abode. They are out of sync with the rest of the very 1912 house, but that isn’t why I hate them. I hate them because 1) they look dirty when they aren’t – water spots, for example, can be seen from two rooms away – and 2) they look clean when they aren’t. Coffee grounds and grease splatters aren’t as obvious as one might hope when one is cleaning, and – I cannot begin to express the degree to which I wish I didn’t know this – mouse droppings blend right into the surface.

Mice have taken refuge from the rain this winter by scurrying into our house. They seem to find particular comfort hanging out in the closet in my study. They also enjoy the space behind the bookshelf in the kitchen. They are not eating our food, which is odd because our food is crazy awesome delicious, but they are leaving droppings on the counters every now and again and while that makes me not thrilled with the mice, it makes me furious at our counters.

Then this morning I edited the pictures I took of dinner last night and a new surge of hatred welled up inside me. After months of shooting dishes in the light box I made out of white foam board and packing tape (it folds down for easy storage!), my kitchen is finally staying light enough late enough for me to take pictures of our dinners in natural light. And so shoot I did, but I was in a rush and didn’t bother to check them very carefully. I’d forgotten that when the sun is shining into the kitchen from the west the black granite counters act as a mirror – as you can see from my hands and camera reflected in the surface of our evil counters above.

We brought our bowls into the dining room (onto a glass table that requires endless cleaning to look streaky at best) and tucked into the risotto of green peas, mint, and a bit of bacon topped with plenty of pecorino cheese and black pepper that came to mind when we were at Zuni Sunday night for spur-of-the-moment drinks and nibbles with a friend. My dashing husband’s mussels with peas and mint and our friend’s risotto with sorrell and pancetta were each tasty, but I saw them as perhaps benefiting more fully from one another. I’ve written here about Zuni before, so I won’t sum it up again, but we grabbed a table in the bar (walked right in and sat right down at 6 on a Sunday – I didn’t steal the table from anyone, but I did see it from half a block away, make a decided and serious bee line for it, and feel like a rock star for nabbing it). As always at Zuni, I felt very much in San Francisco in the very best of ways.

I couldn’t help, though, eying that shiny copper bar: easily stained and highly reflective, but you would be able to see mouse shit on it from a mile away.