How to Boil an Egg (instructions). With Easter almost here, I thought I would share some ways to best boil the perfect egg. If your like us, you make about 25 eggs so you can decorate them. Then you end up eating egg sandwiches, eggs in salad, eggs goldenrod, boiled eggs, and pretty much anything you can think of to get rid of the eggs you lovingly dipped in pretty colors and tinted with glitter. Charlotte doesn’t particularly like it when you eat her eggs either.

You may or may not remember my burned boiling egg disaster from Thanksgiving. I promise you, that these instructions are not the ones I used to create this: (yes, this is a real picture of my eggs)

How to (actually) boil an egg

1) Stop blogging. I really mean this. If you blog and cook at the same time, the results are above. And don’t even ASK me about the smell. I shudder at the thought.

2) Try to preplan your egg boiling. Eggs that are about 5 days old work the best for peeling, so if you are running out to buy 24 dozen eggs the night your planning on actually making them up, you wont have such a great peeling time.

3) Grab your eggs and try to make sure they don’t have cracks already. If they are cracked and you boil them, you are not only at risk for bacteria, but are more likely to create bigger cracks, which don’t look so pretty when you are at the Easter Egg decoration part.  I have read everywhere that you can put a small pin hole in the bottom of the egg that releases pressure and helps prevent egg cracks. Some people swear by it and some say its an old wives tale.

Add your eggs very gently to a pot and cover with cold water. If you cover with hot water, you risk the water getting too hot too quickly and you may end up with some overcooked eggs. Yum.

4) Here you have 2 choices. You can add salt and risk the water boiling too quickly and overcooking the eggs, but reap the benefits of possibly firming up the egg making it easier to peel. OR you can skip the salt and just wait a little longer on your eggs being done. Put lid on pot.

5) This is where you probably usually go wrong with boiling an egg. Once your water is at a rapid boil, REMOVE FROM THE HEAT and leave the lid on the pan. Let your eggs continue to cook in the hot water, but not on the heat, for the remainder of their cooking time. Depending on how many eggs you have and the size of your sauce pan, this will vary, but most say between 10-20 minutes. I personally wait for 20. If you wait too long, your eggs will have that greenish tinge to the yolk.

6) Remove eggs from hot water and add to a bowl of cold water and let cool cool for about 10 minutes. There is nothing worse then peeling a hard boil egg to have it burn the crap out of your fingers. I personally prefer to peel mine also under running cold water. Don’t tell an environmentalist.

How to make Homemade Easter Egg Dye

1) Gather up your ingredients. You will need vinegar and a variety of items to color with the vinegar.

We suggest

• unsugared koolaid
• coffee grounds
• food coloring drops from your frosting stash (35 drops or so),
• blueberries/strawberries crushed
• juices from your fridge.
• brightly colored flowers

2) Put 1-2 TBSP of vinegar to your ingredient that you are mixing to create your color and 1/2 cup hot water.

3) Some people prefer to boil the water water with your ingredient till heated up to gain the most color and mixing together and then top off with the vinegar.

You can also:

• Color your eggs to repel the dye and create patterns
• Cover in ribbons
• Dip in Glitter
• Dip in Beads

4) Commence blogging.

~Trisha