30-hour onions

Several mentions of how well caramelized onions freeze had me eyeing the Costco-sized sack of onions in my pantry. San Diego is not exactly known for its cool and dry weather, so leaving all those onions out made me slightly nervous. Follow up these thoughts with an article on dyeing eggs with onion skins, and you can imagine how I spent my Easter morning.

The eggs, dyed using the skins of regular yellow onions, turned a rich terracotta color. I'd be curious to try red onions, as I imagine they would make a nice purple egg. Being the only boiled egg eater in the house, I had one for lunch today and saved one for a later salad, but was inspired to turn the rest into pickled eggs. Throwing together my own pickling spice from scratch was cool and made me very impressed at the spice collection I have acquired. The only thing I didn't have was whole mustard seed.

The onions took forever. I broke out the mandolin (I knew I kept that thing around for a reason) and quickly sliced a pile of onions into extremely thin slices. I then let them cook in the crock pot... and cook... and keep cooking overnight... and keep cooking while I went to work. They were finally done this afternoon, at which point in time I spooned them into the wells of a mini-muffin pan and put it out in the big freezer (I love that thing!). I think I'll be rolling in caramelized onions for a while, so the whole process was probably worth it.

Today my stomach decided that 14 hours was not a long enough time to digest the twice-baked potato I had for my Easter dinner the night before. I know this not only because of the heavy, unsettled feeling of my stomach, but also because a little came up to greet me this morning. Who made hash browns, I thought, confused. I wound up going back home after a couple of hours and sleeping the rest of the morning. Shortly after I woke up, R arrived home with a few groceries and (drum roll, please) Vegemite! I've been looking for the stuff for ages. He totally made my day.