by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Obvious-yet-profound revelation of the day: The connection between eggs and Easter is not a coincidence.

I feel like a fool even admitting this, but until I had a real relationship with real, live chickens, I didn't really consider that they might have a laying season. But — duh — of course they do! Chickens lay sporadically when it's cold and dark and wintery. Then as the lightness of spring comes their laying cranks up. We're getting six eggs nearly every day, and the weather is as springy and spectacular as I've ever seen it. These things are related.

And of course a basketful of eggs is a longtime Easter tradition. I thought about that this afternoon as I took my basket to pick up our blue, green, pale brown, and rich ecru eggs.

I wanted to do something special with our bounty of colorful (and delicious) eggs for the holiday.

My inspiration? The ever-fabulous Pam Zsori, whose housemartin blog is a favorite around here, and whose spring design tips are in our April issue of Sunset. (Now on newsstands, people.)

I was browsing her blog when I came across this idea — pure genius:

Rather than the sacchrine palette Easter-egg dye usually imparts, these eggs were sophisticated, gorgeous, surprising. She dyed brown eggs. Look at how marvelous they are!

Energized by this stroke of brilliance, I decided that I too would dye our colorful eggs to achieve new colorful heights. And rather than use those old-standard dye pellets, I decided that I would go with all-natural dyes. (Ha, ha. This seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I did some research, consulting the natural dye instructions at Plantea.com. Since they recommend hot dye methods over cold ones, I decided that's what I'd use. But I thought 30 minutes was too long to boil eggs — I wanted then hard-cooked, not over-boiled. Since I'd recently read instructions for making perfect hard-cooked eggs every time, I tried to incorporate that timing into making the eggs. Also, at this point, the prospect of using our precious eggs from our own chickens for this weird experiment started to seem like a bad idea, so I bought brown eggs from Trader Joe's (along with white eggs, which would act as a control group).

As for my natural dyes, I went with things I had on hand or could buy at TJ's. (It was a Tuesday night. Time was tight.)

Although experienced natural-dyers go with onion skins and other such ingredients, I went with the three most-staining things I could come up with: blueberry juice, beets, and mustard. (Natural dyeing techniques favor the lazy refrigerator-cleaner. I swear, I opened that blueberry juice in December, so I didn't feel bad about using it to dye my eggs. Also, I had no fewer than three open bottles of mustard; who knows when I opened those.)

The beets I pureed, then added water, and the mustard I thinned with water. I added white vinegar to each batch, because that's supposed to help the dye stick.

Then I put my eggs on the stove, brought them to a boil in the (very vivid) dye/juice/weird runny mustard, then let them sit, covered for 14 minutes, as our instructions specified for tasty hard-cooked eggs. Then, they went into the fridge to cold-soak overnight.

Let's just call this a failed experiment and get it over with:

The pretty blue, green, and brown eggs you see here are eggs as they came straight from the chicken. The creepy black ones were dyed with blueberry (color that, by the way, unattractively flakes off when you touch them) and the mustard-dyed ones were crazy-blotchy. You don't even see the beets, because rather than the violet I was hoping for, they turned out uneven beige.

The good news is that they're cooked perfectly. Now I just have to figure out how to use up 14 hard-cooked eggs.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

After fiddling around with gallons of milk, many lemons from our tree, homemade salt, and several different types of herbs from the garden, we've decided to make two cheeses for our one-block-diet summer feast: fresh chive cheese (firm, for slicing) and oregano queso blanco (crumbly, for sprinkling).

FRESH CHIVE CHEESE

TIME: About 2 1/2 hours (45 minutes active time)
MAKES: A 7-in. log (about 2 in. diameter)

We wanted to make our own version of caprese salad (ripe tomatoes + basil + mozzarella), but found out that mozzarella isn't the easiest cheese for beginners to tackle. So we adapted this simple recipe from one in Ricki Carroll's Home Cheese Making (Storey Publishing, 2002), for the Indian cheese called chenna. It's really fun to make: once you have curds, you gather them up and knead them, just as you would bread dough, until they're satiny smooth. We added herbs and salt, rolled the curds into a log shape, chilled it, and sliced it into rounds. We're planning to layer it with lots of different kinds of tomatoes, our own basil, and vinaigrette made with our own olive oil and vinegar (and a drop of our own honey).

1 gal. whole milk (not ultra-pasteurized)*
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (from 4 to 5 large lemons
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped chives        

1. In a large, heavy pot, heat milk to a gentle boil over medium-high heat, stirring every now and then so it won't scorch (this will take about 30 minutes, so bring a book). As soon as it boils, remove it from the heat and drizzle in lemon juice, stirring slowly and gently. Keep stirring until solid white curds separate from greenish-white, translucent liquid whey. (If whey is still milky instead of clear, heat the pot gently until whey is clear.) Let pot sit until curds have settled below whey, about 15 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, line a large colander with cheesecloth and set in sink. Pour curds into colander and rinse gently with lukewarm water for 5 seconds. Gather cheesecloth up over curds and gently twist to squeeze out some liquid (but not all; it should still be dripping a little).

3. Put a plate on cheesecloth-wrapped curds and top with a 5-lb. weight. Let drain 45 minutes. (At this point it may still be dripping a bit; this is okay.)

4. Unwrap cheese and put in bowl of stand mixer with dough hook attachment; add salt and chives. Beat cheese on medium-low speed (or knead it by hand) until silky-looking and no longer grainy (it should look like cream cheese), 10 to 12 minutes.

5. Roll cheese into a 2-in.-thick log and wrap in waxed paper and then plastic wrap. Chill until cold and firm, at least 1 hour. The cheese will keep for up to 3 days in the fridge.

* We used cream-top organic milk from Straus Family Creamery, in Marshall, California, for both our cheeses, because a) it was as local a milk as we could find  b) it has wonderful flavor and comes from healthy cows.

OREGANO QUESO BLANCO

1. In a large, heavy pot, heat milk over medium-high heat just to the point of boiling, stirring often to prevent scorching. As soon as the milk looks as though it's about to boil (small bubbles will being to break the surface), remove the pot from the heat and, whisking briskly to create tiny curds, drizzle in lemon juice. Reduce heat to low, return pot to burner, and whisk for another 2 minutes (do not let the milk boil). Cover and let sit 10 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, line a large colander with cheesecloth and set in the sink. Pour in curds and whey. Tie two opposite corners of cheesecloth into a knot over curds and do the same with the other two corners. Hang cheesecloth sack from sink faucet for 1 to 2 hours, or until curds have stopped draining.
3. Pour curds into a bowl and add salt and oregano. Rub between your fingers to mix and to break curds into small grains. The cheese will keep up to 1 week in the fridge.

by MacKenze Geidt, Sunset Assistant Travel Editor

Meet Jumbo: (and Jumbo's little brother egg on the right, providing size perspective in this case)

Jumbo weighs a whopping 72 grams.  Now that may not sound like a lot, but consider this: I checked with the USDA to find out average egg size delineation and here's what I found:

Large = minimum 45 grams; Extra Large = minimum 50.5 grams; Jumbo = minimum 56 grams

That makes our Jumbo egg 16 grams larger than a regulation Jumbo egg! (it was so big that the lid of a Trader Joe's Jumbo egg carton wouldn't close over it!)

Look how big Jumbo is compared to a storebought egg (Jumbo on the left, sterile-looking storebought egg in the center, and Little Brother on the right).   Around the office, Jumbo was initially referred to as "The Dinosaur Egg," and everyone was eager to see the contents (I personally was secretly hoping the contents would be somehow mutant...)

I finally worked up the nerve to crack Jumbo and got an inadvertent lesson in egg-cracking from Sunset Food Writer, Amy Machnak.  Amy taught me that you should never crack an egg on the surface of the bowl you're using to collect the contents.  Crack the egg on a separate surface.  Why?   Bacteria collects on the outside of an egg shell (think Salmonella), so the shell shouldn't make contact with the egg white and yolk.  Good tip!  The U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed:

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/Focus_On_Shell_Eggs/index.asp

Check out Jumbo's contents: Jumbo had twins!                                                                                        

A double yolk!  My secret wish for mutant contents was fulfilled!   Although maybe it's not that uncommon after all... According to PoultryHelp.com, "double Yolkers appear when ovulation occurs too rapidly, or when one yolk somehow gets "lost" and is joined by the next yolk."

http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html

Compare our beautiful double yolk with the storebought option:

Margo True, Sunset Food Editor explained that the runnier the yolk is, the older it is.  Conversely, the tighter the egg white, the fresher it is. 

Top image = storebought

Bottom = Sunset home-grown double-yolk egg

Which one would you rather eat??

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

Well, here’s a bizarre twist in our year of wine at Sunset—a cautionary tale for anyone planning to do this at home!

We’ve had our stash of glass carboys filled with Chardonnay and Syrah lined up in a breezeway behind one of the buildings on our campus here in Menlo Park, with some smaller containers of the same wines alongside—intended for topping-off the bigger vessels as we pull wine out for tasting and analyzing. But when staffers in that building came in to work the other day, they found a stranger—from all appearances homeless—passed out beside the lot. He’d drunk an entire magnum of our Syrah. Generous evidence of the fact was smudged all over his face. Conflicted on all fronts, we called in the police. Their parting message to our plant manager, as they escorted the man to their car, was, “Tell whoever made that wine that it must be good, because this is one happy man!” A chuckle and a painful head shake all in one. Needless to say, we’ve moved the rest of the wine to an inside courtyard, where it’s thriving. Next up: a chemical analysis—pH, TA (total acidity), all the really exciting details.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

In an attempt to create a more substantial one-block feast, one that won't have us ordering Chinese an hour later, we're going to add some cheese to the menu. Mozzarella came to mind first, because it's so tremendous with ripe tomatoes and basil. But it seemed like a slightly tricky one to make and perhaps a wee bit painful. We'll save it for when we're more, er, experienced.

So, we did what most people do when they've never made cheese before: We got ourselves a copy of the invaluable Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll, first published in 1982 and re-released in 2002.

Then, the question of ingredients. Since we weren't raising any kind of milk-providing animal, we were going to have to "import" some milk. California law prevents us from buying directly from the nearest owner of cows, goats, or sheep (milk can only be sold to the public from a licensed store).

We've ended up with probably the best milk commercially available, from Straus Creamery, in Tomales Bay, California. Straus was the first certified organic dairy west of the Rockies, and the Straus family's big-picture wisdom and energy has helped save huge portions of that beautiful area from development. And their milk is really, really good (Cowgirl Creamery uses Straus milk to make their award-winning cheeses). We're thinking of the milk as an "import" that we'll transform into a different food ourselves, to make it as personal as the rest of what we're going to eat.

Besides milk, all we have to make cheese is what we have from the garden: lemons, a variety of herbs from the garden, and salt (which we hope to make ourselves too, though it's seeming crazy to try).

Team Cheese came together as quickly as a batch of fresh curds, and we divided up to make a few of Carroll's recipes. Our plan: to make our own versions of the cheeses we liked best.

Warming up plain milk was the first step for all four recipes we attempted.

We tried:

* Lemon cheese (meant to be moist, with a "spreadable consistency and a mild, lemony flavor" according to the headnote);

* Queso blanco ("a firm cheese, with a bland, mildly sweet flavor")

* Whole-milk ricotta ("good flavor and a high yield")

* Chenna (an Indian cheese "kneaded while still warm into a light, velvety smooth, whipped-cream consistency. It is an essential ingredient in many Bengali sweets")

Our results (doubtless skewed by the fact that we had no heavy cream, no cheese salt or citric acid, and no vinegar:

* Lemon cheese: A winner, though ours was crumbly and fluffy. It seemed a lot more like Mexican queso fresco, possibly because we decided to whisk the curds vigorously as soon as they'd set, and to add minced fresh oregano. We were trying to come up with a plausible topping for a Mexican-style corn soup--and this seemed to work.

* Queso blanco: we totally lost control of the temperature, which needed to be between 185° F. and 190° F. I'm not sure what we ended up with, but curdling required a vast amount of lemon juice (again, to be fair, the recipe specified vinegar). Kinda rubbery.

* Whole-milk ricotta: Not so different from the lemon cheese. Again required way more lemon juice than expected, just to get a curdle going...an accidental boil sealed the fate of this cheese. "Hard and gritty!" read the notes on the recipe.

* Chenna. A hit. The unusual technique of kneading the curds didn't produce "whipped-cream consistency" for us--it was more like cream cheese--but we folded in some chopped chives, rolled it into a log, sliced it, and had a very acceptable stand-in for fresh mozzarella.

So! Two cheeses join the one-block feast menu.

By Lauren Bonar Swezey, Sunset special projects editor

Believe it or not, it's true. Everything is NOT hunky dory in the test garden these days. We've had our first attack of those cursed tiny (1/16 inch long) gray aphids. They've hit our cauliflower!

Aphids in general aren't that bad, especially when they hang out on the tips of new growth (such as the green ones you might find on your roses). It's easy to blast them off with a strong spray of water. But get those clinging, soft-bodied insects inside cauliflower curds and the wily creatures are nearly impossible to extract. So what's a gardener to do?

I asked Ryan, our test garden coordinator and expert CSA farmer who grows lots of veggies at Blue House Farm in Pescadero, how he controls aphids. Here are his tips:

• Prevention is the best medicine. Aphids attack stressed plants. Make sure your plants are getting the best care possible—adequate sun, water, and air circulation.

• Don't over fertilize. Too much nitrogen produces lush growth - a magnet for aphids. Most cool-season veggies grow perfectly well with just compost mixed into the soil before planting. If your soil is particularly poor or sandy, you can also mix in an organic fertilizer (follow package directions).

• Plant vigorous varieties. According to Ryan, some heirloom varieties aren't as vigorous as modern hybrids. If you prefer certain heirlooms because of their romantic past, just make sure you give them perfect garden conditions.

• Monitor the crops. At the first sign of an infestation, blast the pests off with water or spray with an organic insecticide, such as insecticidal soap.

Once the pests have infested your broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and other cool-season crops, here's how to get rid of them (well, MOST of them):

• Soak in a tub of water. Right after harvest, drop the whole head in a tub of water for 20 minutes or so. Swish it around to release the insects.

• Blast with water. While holding the heads in your hand, blast them with a strong stream of water. Beware! You'll get wet.

Of course, you could also just not worry about the aphids and savor the added protein. Bon appetit!

More about safer pest controls