With the beginning of lent, the Armenian տանտիկին is not only preparing traditional Armenian lenten dishes, (a delight to all the vegan members of the family), but, if she is wise, she has begun saving onion skins. Onion skins? you ask. . . Yes, our little secret. But in fact, (to quote my favorite Armenian Professor Avedis Sanjian), more often than not (end quote), we Armenian mothers and grandmothers do NOT plan ahead; rather, we scurry around the week before Easter, stealing onion skins from the bottoms of the bins of brown onions at our local green grocers, or even begging the manager in the vegetable section of our favorite supermarket for onion skins from the back room, or actually surreptitiously stirring their onion bin in hopes that more onion skins will fall off their onions, and oh, yay, more onion skins for us! They don't know! They throw them away! A comedy, for sure (filmmaker friends, please take note!)
Just a guess - coloring Easter eggs??
ReplyDeleteNow you have to tell us how we make the dye! The true Easter egg hunt was after the holidcay celebration, finding the leftover hard-boiled buggers in every dish you were offered. I'm surprised Grandma Jenny didn't invent a hard-boiled egg-gle food cake.
ReplyDeleteAren't you going to tell us why they're desperate for onion skins?
ReplyDeleteI tried the onion skin type of dying for Pascha eggs and it did not work well. I must have done something wrong.
ReplyDeleteNow I use Greek dye, failproof.
Are you going to tell us how you do it?
@Fr. Stephen Lourie
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! With photos and all! Stay tuned!