We started using this idea while camping. Easy to prepare ahead of time and delicious. Pickled eggs! To make egg salad sandwiches you just slice and dice the pickled eggs, add a bit of mayo, slap it on some bread and you are ready to eat! Super easy and incredibly delicious! Now we like eating it as a quick meal anytime in the summer months. So let’s start with the pickled eggs part of this.
Hard Boil 18 eggs and peel them. I do the eggs in the instant pot (follow your IP directions) and place the eggs in ice water to cool. Using a spoon I crack the egg lightly in a line around the middle and use the spoon inverted ( like and upside down scoop) to slide under the crack and slip the egg shells off easily. A regular spoon (inverted/upside down) seems to be perfect to fit in between the shell and the egg to get that shell to slip right off no fuss no muss! Set your eggs to the side and make the juice next.
Step 2:
Meanwhile in a pot add:
4 cups vinegar
1TBLS pickling spices
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
1 sweet onion sliced into large chunks (I quarter mine)
1/3 cup sugar
Boil the above for 5 minutes and let cool. this is important because you don’t want to put hot liquid in a cold mason jar… it will break!
Place your peeled eggs in the jar. I use a 1/2 gallon jar. I like to first scoop the onions into the jar and then pour the liquid in over the eggs and onions. That way if you have too much juice to fill the jar you don’t loose any of the yummy onions. If you have extra juice… save it! put it into a separate jar in the fridge. As you remove eggs to use, you can pour the left over juice into the big jar of pickled eggs (the big jar tends to lower with the juice level as the summer goes on and you put eggs in and out. If you forget, it is ok! You can just add more vinegar to the main jar as needed to top it off). The turmeric does not add any flavor per sey… but it does create that beautiful sunshine yellow color on the eggs! You can start eating them within 24 hours. Be sure to refrigerate! As you use your eggs… just boil and peel new ones and plop them in the jar of juice. You only make the juice once! Keep reusing it all summer! Just add more hard boiled eggs as needed.
Isn’t that a pretty egg!?!?! To make egg salad. Simply slice and dice. Mush with a fork if you want (we like larger chunks of eggs in our egg salad sandwiches) and add mayo to get to the consistency that you like. You can add things like spices and pickle relish… but we DO NOT add anything else… because it already has that “pickle” flavor like a normal egg salad sandwich (only better). We like this set up because it is just a 3 ingredient sandwich. Pickled eggs, mayo, and bread. perfect for camping or a hot summer day when you want something cool and refreshing and not hard to make. Quick and easy meal. Prep’ed ahead of time.
Now if you want to get fancy… we make homemade bread (see previous blog posts)… and this is really good and super yummy together if you fold in dried cranberries in the bread dough. It gives the egg salad sandwich a sweet but tangy flavor that is spectacular! sounds weird but it really is delicious!
This meal was for a birthday too! Lol so I have to share my stencil. A stencil with a bit of cocoa powder. No cake for this party! Just fresh bread hot from the oven! We are all on diets! lol believe it or not, this is a low cal/low carb meal!
We like to add a fresh Spinich salad with some homemade strawberry syrup as a side dish. We can the strawberry syrup when strawberries are in season and have it handy to go whenever we want some. It’s also really good on ice cream or cake! Good with yogurt and cottage cheese also! I will do another post on the strawberry syrup someday… but basically it is:
Super secret strawberry syrup recipe! Shhhhh!
9 to 12 cups strawberries (we take the stems out, cut in quarters and freeze the strawberries for at least a week as this provides the best sauce flavor. This also allows us to buy large quantities of fresh strawberries on sale and not have to rush to can them all)
3lb bag of sugar (yes the whole bag! That’s about 8-9 cups of sugar give or take. I don’t measure I just pour the whole bag in lol)
1/4 cup lemon juice.
Thaw the strawberries in a pot on the stove on med heat. Once thawed turn up the heat a little and bring to a boil.
Turn off heat and use an immersion blender to chop up the strawberries.
Add sugar and lemon juice. Turn heat back on and bring back to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes.
Place in steralized canning jars (this makes about 5-7 pints). We water bath ours for 10 minutes. Remember this is syrup not jam… it’s supposed to be “runny” so you can drizzle it. But if it does set (mine never has) you get jam. It’s basically the same recipe for strawberry jam without adding the (sure gel) pectin to get it to set into a jam consistency.
Those pickled eggs also make a good high protein snack all by themselves! So we go thru a lot of them in the summer! We like these better than beet pickled eggs because of the ability to use them so many different ways. They are good sliced on salads. Don’t laugh!!!!!! but they are good sliced on top of pizza too (like you would add banana peppers after your pizza has been cooked already). So get creative! Try something new! That’s how we ended up making this pre made meal plan lol all by accident really…….
Conestoga Chuck 