Red-beet eggs and other things

I’ve had a couple of questions about the eggs in a previous post.

Yes, those are really eggs. Red-beet eggs are a Pennsylvania Dutch treat. They’re basically eggs pickled with beets (the beets are what give them such a lovely color). My husband grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country and his mother taught me how to make them the way her mother made them.

I don’t have the recipe with me on our sabbatical adventures, but this one is fairly close to how I make them:

• 1 (15 ounce) can sliced beets
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
• 12 hard cooked eggs, peeled

Heat up the vinegar and sugar just until the sugar melts. The more sugar you use, the sweeter the eggs will be (stating the obvious here!). Add the can of beets, juice and all. Place the eggs in a jar, pour the vinegar-sugar-beets mixture over the eggs, put a lid on it. Refrigerate.

It takes a couple of days for the eggs to pickle and take on that lovely color. The longer they sit, the better they taste (up to a point; you don’t want to keep them for months or years or anything like that). You can reuse the pickled beet mixture for another round of eggs. After that it starts to lose its flavor.

My mother-in-law liked them on the sweet side. I like them vinegary, so the amount of sugar I use is somewhere between 1/4 – 1/2 cup. Some folks add onions. I’ve never tried them that way. I have used fresh beets rather than canned. You have to cook the beets in a little water first, then add the sugar and vinegar.

(Note:  I posted an update with the recipe my mother-in-law gave me.  You can find that recipe here.  Enjoy!)

Other things

It seems my most popular entry is “My Feet.” It was kind of funny at first, but it’s beginning to feel a bit creepy. There are a lot of people with foot fetishes out there (if the search engine terms on my blog stats are a reasonable sampling) and the post I did about my feet has been drawing in visitors. I’m thinking about changing the photos, at least the second one although a part of me feels it’s ridiculous to care one way or another.

Still and all, it’s a little weird.