Things The Balabusta Is Highly Unlikely to Do For Easter

Top of the list is

1. Dye Easter eggs with natural dyes made out of regular stuff you can find at home!!!

Now, you may be saying, why not? The Balabusta has been known to aspire to be craftsy. She may, someday, want her children to experience an Easter egg hunt. Why not dye beautiful eggs with natural products found in the back of the kitchen cabinets?

Because:

a. As Storm Jameson wrote, 'life is too short to stuff a mushroom'.

b. Because you end up with eggs that look damn weird.

c And, because God intended for eggs to be colored with food coloring, or those little Pas dye packs, and dipped into the boiling water with those little wire egg-holders.

Why is the Balabusta ranting about this? No particular reason, except I happened to see this link to a Reader's Digest article about natural egg dyes, and for some reason, the idea of carefully using red cabbage (boil, then soak eggs overnight) to dye eggs 'robin's egg blue', when you can get the same result with BLUE FOOD COLORING offended me to the depths of my soul. Especially since that whole rigmarole will only get you blue eggs, so to get green, you have boil spinach or grass--I swear to God, they say grass--and turmeric for green-yellow, and red wine for purple, and 'beet juice' for pink, and every damn dye has to be boiled or soaked in a different manner. The end result of all this, mind you, is not a tapestry, it's a bowl of hard-boiled eggs which will be hidden in your shrubbery and then eaten by small children so they get some protein into them in between giant amounts of jelly bean and marshmallow.

Maybe if it were part of a home-schooling project about natural dyes or something, otherwise, I'm sorry, HECK NO.

Apparently those who have tried this experiment haven't been all that happy with it. Rebecca over at Green Baby Guide tried. She even posted the photograph at the top of this post, with the note I dyed these eggs using blueberries, chili flakes, and a leaf . . . in my imagination. Despite her best intentions--she writes--wouldn’t it be great to tint eggs without frightening chemicals and excess packaging?--apparently beets, wine, black beans, spinach and the aforementioned red cabbage all let her down. Turmeric, apparently, works great. So does coffee. Which will turn your white eggs into brown eggs.

Look, I have nothing against natural food dyes, but Easter calls for little bottles of food coloring, and a simple, child-friendly approach. Don't tell me about boiling cabbage overnight.

I Can See The Hametz At The End of the Pesach Tunnel

Not a bad holiday, overall. My mother and I went to the first-night seder at the JCC, and then friends invited me to their second-night seder, and conveniently, Easter break for St. Dymphna's started on Thursday, so I have been at home, which makes eating for Pesach that much easier. My cholesterol has probably gone up a notch, but otherwise, so far, so good.

Today being Easter Sunday, the Husband has ham, and I bought him some chocolate rabbits to bite the heads off of.

Now, for a delightful Easter moment, I present the photos of the first annual wolf Easter egg hunt from Everything Wolf.

The complications of the interfaith family

Erev Shabbos I was over to my folks' place for dinner. It's Pesach. It's also a Friday during Lent. We had fish and potatoes with salad. It was good--but it was also, more or less, the only option available. This is what happens when pious people of different faiths get married to each other.

The fella is not pious--he's almost piously not pious--but he will still expect a chocolate bunny and some form of nice treyf dinner for Easter. I suppose I will have an artichoke. (If some rabbi with too much time on, I'm sure his, hands has discovered that artichokes are not kosher l'Pesach, don't tell me, okay?)

Wedding plans are coming along, although I have to say that I am feeling like a slug when I look at the progress that AidelMaidel is making on hers. We have a rabbi, and also, almost certainly, a place to have the wedding. We now need a caterer, music, and I need to get the two of us dressed. We also need to choose a ring, get a chuppah, uh, flowers...

One thing I've decided I DO want for the wedding, or rather after, is that I really want to do the thing where you save the bits from the glass the groom breaks and have them embedded in a nice Lucite cube suitable for displaying on your mantelpiece. I don't know why this has such a deep appeal--OK, I do, it seems like the epitome of slightly schticky grown-up middle-class settled-down-ness, and I WANT it. Does anyone have a Lucite cube company to recommend?

Wedding customs are strange things. A few weeks ago I was getting a lift with a coworker and her wife, who teaches at another school in our area. These ladies, you need to understand, are both very opinionated individuals, and they were both married once before. The subject of freezing one's wedding cake for the first year came up. (Clearly this cannot be a very old custom.) Coworker (CW) had not done this for her first marriage. Coworker's Wife (CWW) had something to say:

CWW: "You didn't freeze the top layer of your wedding cake? No WONDER your marriage failed!"

CW: "It's stupid! And look who's talking!"

CWW: "Hey, I was married for ten years, and not all of it was bad, only the last three or four. Because I froze the cake!"

CW: (Bronx cheer)

Balabusta: "Ladies, please, shlom bayit, shlom bayit, CW, the traffic, the traffic is merging..."

But still, I'm going to risk it. We're going to EAT the cake, and assume that we'll bake more during our marriage...