Boiling vs. Baking

Some words on dying Easter eggs.
So of course I can never *just* dye Easter eggs the normal way.  Why?  I have no idea.  I love a good experiment.  Perhaps you will remember my mixed-results last year with natural egg-dyes (cabbage, beets, etc.)  I did a bunch of research looking for interesting ways to dye eggs that didn't involve the traditional PAAS kit.  I landed on the kool-aid method.  The idea is that you can use kool-aid packets to dye eggs and you don't even need to add vinegar because the packets are full of citric acid.  Sounds easy, right?  Enter the search for kool-aid packets.  I'm not sure if it's just the region that I live in or the time of year but kool-aid doesn't seem to be a hit around here.  All I could find at about 6 different stores (including WalMart which I drove quite a ways to!) were various colors of red and purple.  I knew the boys wouldn't be satisfied if there was no blue or green dye.  After going to about 6 or 7 stores, I gave up and bought a PAAS kit. 
Did the experimentation stop there?  Of course not!  I looked around and decided I would try out a method of tie-dying eggs.  I also decided to try what was supposedly a much easier way to hard-boil eggs: by baking them in the oven.  Let me just say I do NOT recommend this method.  1/3 of my 18 eggs came out cracked beyond use.  Two of those eggs exploded in the oven.  Awesome.  The shells also lose a little bit of their white lustre in the oven.  I boiled a few on the stove to sub in for the broken ones and they came out pristine and perfect.  Lesson learned.
The tie-dying was the one part of the experiment that turned out fabulous.  It is easy and fun.  You just wrap an egg in a piece of old cloth (I used an old t-shirt) and rubber-band it off on the ends and wherever else you want to, just like how you would tie-dye a shirt.  Then just thoroughly soak the wrapped eggs in dye and let them dry still wrapped up for about 24 hours in the fridge.  And voila!  Fun eggs!  The more wrinkled the fabric and the tighter the rubberbands, the more patterns will show up.

Oh...and my son accidentally landed on another interesting thing related to the traditional dye-kits.  When I was setting up all the little cups of vinegar for the tablets, my older son dropped two tablets into one cup (yellow and blue).  He referred to the resulting color as: asparagus-green.  That's an accurate description.  I think it would be fun to try mixing more colors to see what happens.  I think mixing a purple and pink tablet and mixing red and orange would probably create great colors.  Here are our eggs.  You will notice the asparagus-green egg one to the far-right.

Who knows what I will dream up to further complicate my life next year...

Being Experimental

Last night, I decided to make some cookies with my boys.  I just wanted to make a quick half-batch of chocolate chip cookies - no refrigerating of the dough (the kids are all about instant gratification), not many cookies to have to eat later.  Now, all you chocolate chip cookie lovers out there probably know all of the important factors in baking a really good chocolate chip cookie and I didn't really have time for any of them, but don't shrug off my accidental discovery.  It made for some excellent cookies.  Back to my story.  I threw in my 1/4 cup of soft, but not melted, butter and my quarter cup of each kind of sugar and then realized that it isn't possible to split an egg in a very effective way.  Shoot.  I didn't have anymore soft butter and I was trying to keep the dough a little cooler so I wouldn't have to refrigerate it, so thawing frozen butter was not really an option.  Hmm...I've got some greek yogurt that needs to get used up?  Yep.  Let's do it.  So I substituted half of the required butter for 0% fat greek yogurt.  I had to compensate by adding a bit of extra flour.  In the end, the dough is not quite as delightful to eat on its own - probably mainly because I'm not a yogurt fan - and the cookies don't spread quite as much as traditional chocolate chip cookies. However, these are absolutely soft and wonderful.  I would definitely throw a dollup of Greek yogurt into my cookies in the future. It was a welcome discovery. 

Less-Guilty Chocolate Chip Cookies
1/4 cup butter softened
1/4 cup 0% fat Greek yogurt
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar packed
2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 Tbls cornstarch
2/3 cup wheat flour
1 cup white flour
12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Cream butter, yogurt and sugars until well-blended.  Add vanilla and egg, mix thoroughly.  In a separate bowl, combine all dry ingredients.  Add dry ingredients to egg mixture.  Blend until just combined.
One other trick I highly recommend: chill the cookie sheets.  Add chocolate chips and mix by hand.
Drop cookie dough on ungreased, chilled cookie sheets (helps reduce spreading).  Bake 9-10 minutes until set but not crisp.  Makes about 20 cookies.

If you're more a fan of raisins than chocolate chips, I'm thinking this recipe could be pretty good with cinnamon, a little bit of oatmeal and some raisins instead.

Berry-cicles

Remember the rocket-pop molds? We've been using them all summer. There have been strawberry pops, strawberry-watermelon pops, kiwi pops (I had a request for green popsicles) and last night I finally attempted striped popsicles. These look pretty cool and have given me the courage to try other interesting ideas - I am particularly curious about freezing chunks of fruit into popsicles (raspberries or strawberries into lemonade sounds particularly delightful).
With these, I was attempting to make some sort of play on the traditional red/white/blue rocket pops, but unfortunately when you puree blueberries, they turn out purple. It was close, I suppose, and since my three-year-old has never seen an old fashioned rocket pop, he has no idea what he's missing (I always liked that whitish-layer).
The middle layer is plain yogurt mixed with some powdered sugar and the top layer is a mixture of fresh strawberries and cherries. My son powered through the strawberry/cherry layer. He was thrown a little off-guard by the "frozen yogurt" layer, stopping to eat more slowly with a slightly puzzled look on his face. Then he loved the blueberry layer so much he was slurping the last of it out of the bottom of holder. The whole thing probably could have been set to some nice piece of classical music. I know, I know, you're thinking "yogurt? really?" I am a bit leery of it myself (as was my husband), but I really wanted to throw in some extra protein/nutrients (and fat) for my skinny little guy. He survived and I'm sure he'll ask for another one.
As far as the mechanics of making these, I was surprised that when I blended the yogurt with the sugar, it lost all firmness and ended up the consistency of milk. Because of this, the blueberry layer sort of bled into it. I would have let each layer freeze separately, but the stick goes all the way through the popsicle, so I didn't think it would work. This is the problem with using popsicle molds to make striped popsicles. It pretty much negates the idea of using juice because the juice would need to be frozen in separate layers or else it would run together. In short, it works better to use purees when making striped popsicles.
In the kitchen, I can be quite a scientist and I always love my little experiments, even though they don't always turn out well. My husband is a patient man, but he does enjoy a good popsicle. Because of his unending patience with all of my healthy rocket-pops this summer, I finally just went and bought him a box of store-bought ones. I'm sure he'll be appreciative. Of course, I'm going to make him try out one of these - yogurt layer and all.