Eggstra, Eggstra...

I must confess, my desire to dye Easter eggs this year was not entirely rooted in childhood nostalgia for the craft project, but also in a surprisingly nostalgic longing for the dish that always came after the eggs were dyed -- egg and olive salad. They say that as you get older, you begin to understand the wisdom of your elders, and in this case at least it's true. Egg and olive salad (a concoction that has no recipe but is just as it sounds: sliced hard-boiled eggs, sliced Spanish olives with pimento, Miracle Whip, and a sprinkle of sugar) is a seemingly unorthodox combination of flavors that somehow just works.


I used to love its unique combination of sweet, salty, and tangy flavors as a child, but the older I got, the more I found myself mortified by its presence in my lunch. My friends would make fun of me for the way it smelled and what they deemed the "gross" combination of ingredients. Eventually, I begged her to stop sending it in my lunch. As far as I can remember, she stopped making it all together as long as I was still living under her roof.

Now that I'm older and less prone to the whims of peer pressure, I've found myself thinking back fondly to the memories of that childhood egg and olive salad, particularly the multicolored batches that resulted from freshly-dyed Easter eggs. Hence, after spending all that time on Saturday decorating eggs, their beauty was not long for this world. Even without a recipe, and never having made it before, the egg and olive salad was just as I remembered it, and just as delicious. Funny thing, nostalgia...