Christy’s Simple Tip: Use a Whisk to Pick Up Eggs

Use a Whisk To Remove Eggs from Boiling Water or Dye Pinnable

Use a whisk to remove Easter eggs from a cup of dye without coloring your fingers, or to lift boiled eggs out of hot water without burning your hands and without dropping the slippery little buggers from a spoon. This also works to remove them from ice water if you cool your eggs after boiling.

Simple press the whisk onto the egg, and the little stinker should pop right through the loops on the whisk.

To remove the egg, separate the wires a tad and the egg should pop right out. If it doesn’t come out, it doesn’t deserve to be free.

Of course, if you like your kids to show up at church on Easter Sunday with dyed hands and wrists, you won’t want to use this technique. For our family the dyed hands on Easter are a tradition, and I’m not one to break with tradition.

I think I’m going to bring a whisk to the next egg-and-spoon race we’re invited to. That’s not cheating, is it?

To see your favorite simple tips featured on The Simple Homemaker (including a link to the page of your choice), please submit it through my contact page or send an email (pictures are optional) to TheSimpleHomemaker at gmail dot com with SIMPLE TIP in the subject.

How to Boil, Peel, and Use Up Hard-Boiled Eggs

How To Boil, Peel, and Use Up Hard-Boiled Eggs - a handy guide for Easter or any time.

Last year I posted several articles about hard-boiled eggs. They were some of my most popular posts of all time. Apparently, you people are all about the incredible edible egg! And why not! Eggs are awesome. In honor of the amazing egg, here is a round-up of my best hard-boiled egg posts, as well as some newbies.

Check out this picture sent in by my sister-in-law, Karen, one of my most faithful readers from Wisconsin. It shows the difference between their old method of boiling and peeling eggs and the new method they learned right here at The Simple Homemaker. Now that’s a gorgeous egg!

Eggs

Do you want gorgeous eggs? Easy as pie! Easier, really. Just follow these directions:

How to Boil a Perfect Hard-Boiled Egg

How to Peel Hard-Boiled Eggs

And if you need simple ideas for what to do with all those hard-boiled eggs, here are a few simple recipes from The Simple Homemaker:

Basic Egg Salad Recipe

Deviled Eggs and Stuffed Egg Chicks

10 Ways to Use Leftover Hard-Boiled Eggs

Boiling, Peeling, and Using Up Eggs...in fun ways!

And here are some ideas sent in by some of my blogging friends (and my blogging daughter) from around the globe:

Stacy Makes Cents’ Mama’s Egg Salad – See what a splash of vinegar can do!

Raising the Barrs’ A Salad A Day – Hard-boiled eggs are just one of the ways she spruces up salads.

The Nourishing Home’s Avocado Egg Salad – Really? Yes, really! It looks fabulous!

Horse Crazy Bookworm’s Totally Brilliant Easter Recipes – Technically, not all of these use hard-boiled eggs, but they’re shaped like eggs, and they’re chocolate, so…close enough. (Just go with it.)

For more ideas, I created a Pinterest board entitled Using Up Hard-Boiled Eggs. It’s about using up hard-boiled eggs. Appropriately named, don’t you think? Check it out for more ideas.

Using Up Hard-Boiled Eggs on Pinterest

I hope this egg post is eggsactly what you were looking for.

Grooooaaaaaaannnnnn!

Feel free to link up any of your recipes for leftover hard-boiled eggs in the comments! 

Special thanks to Karen for sending in the results of her egg experiment!

Creative Easter Eggs With and Without Dye

Creative Easter Eggs With or Without Dye --Twice the fun, half the mess!



My kids love creating masterpieces on their Easter eggs. They each receive 18 eggs as their blank canvases, and they spend a couple hours meticulously manipulating the appearance of the egg until we have a barnyard of animals, a testament of Bible characters, a library of elliptical novellas, a museum of art, a secret test site full of aliens, and about three or four eggs reading “I luv Momy” and “Ur the bets Momy.” Those are my favorite.

Living in a travel trailer as traveling music missionaries, I’m not too crazy about the mess of egg dye, although it might be an improvement over the upholstery manufacturers put in RVs, if you know what I mean. Because I’m a dye-on-the-upholstery party pooper this year, but not an egg-fun party pooper, I researched some alternatives to the usual egg-in-cup method.

I also included some dye-related eggs for those of you who don’t have upholstery in your dining area, but who may be tired of the same old egg-in-a-cup dyeing method.

Creative Easter Eggs

We can’t start an Easter egg post without my daughter Hannah’s no-fail egg boiling method:

How to Boil Eggs: Making Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs: The truth is that this is “no-fail” when she does, it, but I have focus issues. I focus really well, but not on what I’m doing.

How to Boil Perfect Hardboiled Eggs Every Time

No-Dye Easter Eggs

These mess-minimized ideas are perfect for small spaces, mamas who don’t want a ginormous mess, or people looking for more than an egg in a cup. We recreated the eggs in this section so you could see the final results.

Sharpie Eggs: You really don’t need a post to tell you how to use a permanent marker to doodle on an egg. My family’s been doing this for at least two generations. Still, it’s the 21st century, and you can’t have any ideas without a link and a tutorial, so here’s a tutorial which basically says to doodle on the egg. Still, it’s a fun post and gives you blown egg techniques.

Creative Easter Eggs That Don't Require DippingCreative Easter Eggs With or Without Dye Creative Easter Eggs With or Without Dye

Thumbprint Eggs: What I love about this is the potential for only the children’s thumbs to be colorful on Easter morning, as opposed to their entire hands. It’s a break with tradition, but I’ll risk it. This egg by my son is not at all what I had in mind, but he did use only his fingerprints, which was the only guidance I gave. That’s the fun of letting them get creative instead of letting them “get creative” by “helping” them do eggsactly what you want. For the idea in my head, click through the link.

Creative Easter Eggs With or Without Dye

String Eggs: The creators use a blown egg, but you can do this either on a regular boiled egg, on an already-dyed egg, or on a balloon and pop it. Popping balloons is one of the joys (or pathological fears) of childhood.

Creative Easter Eggs With or Without Dye

Aluminum Foil Egg-Dyeing Technique: Super simple and significantly less messy than traditional dyes.

IMG_9556.jpg

Melted Crayon Eggs: This idea from Family Fun would be great for the older kids. The eggs would be too hot for the littles unless they are closely supervised. Did you notice that remark about focus issues? We really enjoyed this method, and the final result is shiny, shimmery, splendid! (This picture doesn’t show the shine.)

Creative Egg Decorating for Kids of All Ages

Decoupage Eggs:  Drag out the junk mail and the 25-cents after holiday napkins for this fun craft. The link uses blown eggs, but my young artist used hard-boiled.

Simple and Creative Easter Eggs for Real Kids (With or Without Dye)

Artist’s Choice: Set out crayons, paints, whatever, and let the kids have at the eggs!

Crayons:

Creative Egg Decorating for Kids -- No Dye Required!

Acrylics:

Simple and Creative Easter Eggs for Real Kids (With or Without Dye)

A very unfinished sequence painting on blown eggs, depicting Jesus’ birth and death:

Simple and Creative Easter Eggs for Real Kids (With or Without Dye)

Creative Egg Dyeing

These techniques all require some sort of dye, and most involve a cup and scooper-outer or colorful fingers unless you follow this simple tip. They are variations on the norm, and will yield some lovely eggs that, quite possibly, nobody will want to eat–because they’re pretty, not grody! For pictures and directions, click on each link.

Tie-Dye Easter Eggs: All the mess is contained in the sink! If we do dye this year, this is it!

Silk-Dyed Eggs: This is a little involved, including the involvement of a trip to the thrift store or the raiding of Dad’s old silk tie collection, but the results are beautiful.

Chinese Tea Eggs…or dinosaur eggs if you have little boys

Sticker Eggs: Save those star stickers!

Kool-Aid Eggs: Cheap, nostalgic…well, not for me, since we didn’t drink Kool-aid, but we did see plenty of commercials with the freakish giant Koolaid pitcher monster crashing through walls and passing out cups full of the liquid contents of its body for children to drink. Who thought of that nightmare scenario?!

Marbleized Eggs: Just add oil to what you’re already doing!

Watercolor Eggs: Technically it’s food coloring, which is dye and which is not watercolor paint, but it doesn’t involve dipping eggs in a tip-over-able cup, and the effect is charming. Great for any age.

Natural Easter Egg Dye: The sky’s the limit here, but this should get your creative “how can I naturally stain my eggs and my children” juices flowing. For more natural dye ideas, check out this post or this cute post.

If you did the math, you realize that I have seven children each decorating 18 eggs, plus the extra dozen I boil for crashes and creative parents, so that totals 138 hard-boiled eggs to consume. I’ve got you covered there, too.

How to Boil, Peel, and Use up Hard-Boiled Eggs

How to Boil, Peel, and Use Up Hard-Boiled Eggs

For more Easter fun, follow my Simple Easter Ideas Pinterest Board.

Happy dyeing! I can’t tell you how many times I wrote “happy dying” over the years before I noticed I was randomly wishing bemused readers everywhere a pleasant death by dropping that “e.” Spelling. It saves lives…and friendships.

What are your best no-dye or dyeing (with an “e”) tips ?