food preservation | West Virginia Mountain Mama

Posts Tagged With: food preservation

Pickled Eggs with Garden Beets a Colorful way to Serve farm Eggs.

Posted on January 22, 2015 by jolynnpowers

As with almost all pickles, pickled eggs were a safe and easy way to store food without refrigeration. Using simple ingredients like water, sugar and cider vinegar people could save their extra eggs from the summer and eat them when the long winter depleted families stores of meat and poultry. I have read that it was the Amish that added their wonderful pickled beets to the eggs to add color and a spicy twist. The tradition is very popular in West Virginia where the eggs are found everywhere from the grocery store to road side restaurants. We are so luck to have many of the Amish traditions passed down from their communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

half of pickled egg

My family takes the beets from our garden and pickles them in a spicy brine of cider vinegar, sugar, cloves, allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon. We then add the pickled beets to boiled eggs. Adding in a fresh dose of water, sugar and cider vinegar for a holiday treat. I make these lovely hot pink eggs at Christmas and Easter every year. Starting about 5 days before the holiday so that the eggs are pink to the edge of the yolk. Letting the eggs soak any longer the brine will toughen the yolk and make it rubbery.

I take 10 boiled eggs to one quart of pickled beets, either home-made or store-bought, adding them to a gallon non reactive container with a lid. To this mixture I add 1 cup water, 1 cup cider vinegar and 3/4 cup sugar to a sauce pan on the stove and simmer until sugar dissolves. I pour that hot mixture over eggs and beets, mix well, seal with a lid and store 4 to 5 days to get the pink up to the edge of the egg white. The longer the eggs soak the stronger the taste.

Pickled eggs floating in beet brine. in a non reactive container

We serve the eggs along with the pickled beets that are in the bottom of the container. The sweet beets are a treat that I can not pass up and the kids love to take a bite into an egg that is not totally pink all the way through and has a bright white stripe inside.

There are many other ways to make pickled eggs some are hot and spicy with hot peppers added, some call for onions and some that are just a cider brine with white eggs. But in our house nothing reminds me of spring as much at hot pink eggs at our Easter table.

Categories: apple cider vinger, beets, beets, canning, Easter, eggs, Preserving | Tags: Amish, beets, Easter, eggs, food preservation, Gardening, pickled beets, pickled eggs, pickles | 3 Comments

Back to school with WordPress and class #201 Branding,Traffic and Growth

Posted on April 16, 2014 by jolynnpowers

I never really thought that I would be blogging ( with dyslexia), let alone trying to increase my readership, stats, or trying to get together enough information for a book. So I am happy to announce that I have rejoined the learning world and signed up for WordPress class. I will spend the next few weeks working on assignments that should make my blog a better place for you the reader. I hope to gain some insight and knowledge on how to better focus my goals and increase my readership. The assignment for this today is to explain to all of you what my goals are for this blog and where I want to be at the end of the year. My goals are pretty simple and are two-fold. First I want to highlight, inform, share and raise awareness of the wonders of the place that I live. West Virginia gets pretty bad rap from other states. It was quite offensive when WVU’s Mountaineers Played in the big twelve, Orange bowl last year and on National TV a sports caster had terrible things to say about our state. Second I would like to at some point publish a regional cooking/ canning book. I find that regional foods from my area are not talked about much and the art of canning/ food preservation is a passion of mine. I want to combine the two and in some way and share great food/ great photos/ and a regional feel to my story.

Route 55 Seneca Rocks, WV

The things that I hope to accomplish with this class are: To increase my Followers to 500 by July… about an increase of about 200. To increase my amount of canning and food posts to 15 over the next three months. To take more and better regional photos. Then finally to get freshly pressed… this a WordPress.com goal.

Home made apple butter

I also want to learn if I need to use a different Theme for this blog so that I could post my cooking and canning under one heading and my photos, stories and family adventurer under other headings. what do you think? I will need all of your help along the way. I will need your feed back and support and maybe one day you all will be able to say that you got to see the before and after of what my blog becomes. So the new adventure begins and I will tag all of my class posts with the numbers 201. So that they will be easy to fallow and I can track them from today to the end of the year when I get to write about what I actually did accomplish. Thanks for following and I hope to post something about my assignment every week so you can see what we are learning.