What to Do With All Those Easter Eggs?

One of the delightful signs of spring is the brightly colored Easter eggs but now that Easter is over, what do you do with all those leftover eggs?

The key to what you do with the leftover eggs lies in how you prepared them and how you handled them after they were cooked. Eggs, like all other protein foods, are susceptible to food-borne bacteria if they are not stored at the right temperature. Hopefully you hard cooked the eggs and put them into the refrigerator right after cooking – sitting at room temperature is when food-borne bacteria grow.

The same recommendation about keeping them out of room temperature applied to when you colored the eggs.

If those beautiful, bright eggs were a part of your Easter display this weekend, and they were out of the refrigerator for more than two hours, you need to either keep them for display only or discard them. Food-borne bacteria grow at room temperature so when foods are left out of the refrigerator for more than two hours the bacteria can continue to grow, potentially leading to food-borne illness when the food is consumed.

While raw eggs can be stored in the refrigerator for three to five weeks, once eggs have been cooked they need to be used within one week, so add eggs to your menu throughout this week.

Hard cooked eggs can top salads, be combined with chopped pickles or celery and light mayo for egg salad, added to potato salad, made into deviled eggs or added to a veggie sandwich for a different texture or protein source.

For more information on food safety visit homefoodsafety.org.