Easter Eggs

In order to be fully prepared come Easter time, you need to start early. 

Traditionally, Serb women start saving discarded onion peel more than a month before Easter.

Yet another old-school method of coloring Easter eggs requires a "wax pen" i.e. a funnel-like contraption made of steel with a wooden handle.

You put small chunks of wax in the funnel, then melt it over a candle and use the molten wax to write or draw images on fresh eggs. This takes forever as the moment the wax starts to cool it stops dripping through the funnel so you have repeat the process over and over again. The turtle-shell egg was the only one my mother painted with the wax before she declared the "wretched thing altogether useless" and abandoned it. I gave it a go as she switched to a different, albeit no less tedious, technique (eggs wrapped tightly in a nylon stockings with a clover, flower or a herb of choice pressed between the egg and the stocking, all this cooked in onion peel or a store-bought coloring agent to leave the image of the flower or a leaf on the egg).

The problem with the wax pen technique is that you cannot possibly know if the egg will turn out as desired until it is fully cooked and safely out of the pot, by which time it is too late to do anything about it.

In spite of my best intentions to mark the Olympic year...

...the result was hardly Olympics-worthy.

Our neighbour Zorica's basket:

Another neighbour Vera's basket:

And this is how all those eggs eventually fared, both the pretty ones and the ones not as quite...

Pajama egg-knocking party is a standard affair every Easter at Grahovac residence...

Some of the food we had them with...

In keeping with FFFF's no-mass-produced-food philosophy, here is some homemade pepper chutney or ajvar (second bowl from the top), then an eggplant-pepper chutney or pindjur (third from the top) and ramp in yogurt (top and bottom).

What??? Easter without a pork roast, you might ask? Of course not, there was lots of it and it was nice and crispy, but I was already in food heaven, too busy (not to mention my fingers too greasy) to take pictures by the time it arrived at the table. This is what it usually looks like:

Hello, georgeus!