Easter Egg Safety

If you boil and dye eggs for Easter, you need to know the following Egg Safety. This is another one of those things, that should go on one of those lists, telling how children of the 50's and 60's are just lucky to be alive! I am pretty sure our boiled and dyed eggs, we used for our Easter Egg hunts, never followed these safety rules. For that matter neither did my children's Easter Eggs.  

1. Use one set of eggs for decorating and hunting, and another for eating. Or to be really safe, use plastic eggs for your Easter egg hunt instead of real ones.

2. Keep everything clean. Wash utensils, countertops and other surfaces that eggs come in contact with. That includes washing your hands thoroughly with soap and hot water before and after handling raw eggs or cooked eggs that will be eaten.

3. Coloring Easter eggs can be fun, but if you're planning to eat the eggs you dye, make sure that you only use food-grade dyes.

4. Keep hard-boiled eggs intended for eating in the refrigerator until the last possible minute.
Transfer to ice chest to keep cold while traveling or going to a park etc.

5. Never let anyone eat eggs that have been unrefrigerated (whether at room temperature or outside) for more than two hours. Hard boiled or otherwise.

6. If you hollow out eggshells by blowing the raw egg through holes in the shell, you could expose yourself to salmonella from raw egg touching your mouth. You should sanitize the outside of the egg before it touches your mouth. To do so, wash the egg in hot water and rinse it in a solution of one teaspoon chlorine bleach per half cup of water.

7. When preparing hard-boiled eggs for an egg hunt, be on the lookout for cracks in the shells. Even tiny cracks can allow bacteria to contaminate the egg. Eggs that have any cracks at all should be thrown away.

8. If you're hiding eggs outside, choose the cleanest hiding places you can, and avoid areas that pets or other animals might visit.

9. Keep track of time to make sure that the hiding and hunting time do not exceed a total of two hours. And remember, the eggs that are found must be refrigerated right away or thrown away if the two hour limit is exceeded.

10. Hard-boiled eggs that have been refrigerated properly must be eaten within seven days of cooking.

EGG SALAD SANDWICHES......HERE I COME!

What do you do with your leftover Easter eggs?