Recipe: Confetti Egg Salad with Olives, Pimentos, Salami, Scallions, and Parsley

With our bouncing baby lambs, newly hatched chicks, and naturally colored eggs, we were all ready for Easter. With our happy hens now laying over 50 eggs a week, we're eating a lot of eggs.

A hard boiled egg is one of my favorite quick snacks, and having a cheerful red vintage Pyrex bowl of them sitting in the fridge is always a comforting sight. Having a bowl of this brightly colored egg salad sitting in the fridge always feels like a treat.

This is the perfect thing to have on hand during busy times like lambing season, when mealtimes can be erratic, and you never know how long a trip to the barn is going to take. A few bites of this filling and protein-packed egg salad atop a couple of crackers, and I'm ready to tackle anything.

The recipe comes from The Artist's Palate: Cooking with the World's Great Artists, one of my favorite books, which I rave about in Feeding My Addictions and A Simple Pasta Recipe: Linguine with Olive Oil, Garlic, Pecorino Romano, and Parsley. If you love food and art, you're going to love this beautiful book.

This batch was made with duck eggs—they really are that yellow!

Confetti Egg Salad

Makes about 7 to 8 cups - Adapted from The Artist's Palate

**Click here to print this recipe**

This fun egg salad, which I've been making since 2007, is the favorite recipe of artist Red Grooms, who is known for his exuberant Pop Art renditions of urban life and whose 'playful constructions and paintings of hectic taxi cabs, crowded subways, and delightfully caricatured people offer truthful (if hilarious) insights into familiar experiences.'

The recipe notes say that it's a nice dish for a picnic or a children's party. What intrigued me is that the eggs are grated rather than chopped or sliced. This takes a little more time than using an egg slicer, but it gives the salad a completely different—and very nice—texture. I added the scallions and parsley for even more confetti color and flavor.

The original version simply calls for 'salami.' I usually use our homegrown lamb salami, which comes in a small chub and is what I call summer sausage because I grew up near San Francisco and the only type of salami I knew was hard Italian dry. I think any type of salami or summer sausage would do.

A digital kitchen scale is great for weighing ingredients like the salami (and postage!) and well worth the investment. I often use mine several times a day.

12 large hardboiled eggs, grated (I use the large holes on a stainless steel box grater)

1 can black olives (drained weight 6 ounces), drained and chopped

1 4-ounce jar chopped pimentos (scant 1/2 cup)

4 to 8 ounces salami, diced (about 1 to 2 scant cups)

6 scallions (green onions), chopped

1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley

3/4 to 1 cup mayonnaise (I'm a Hellman's girl)

Salt and pepper to taste

In a large bowl, combine the eggs, olives, pimentos, 4 ounces of the salami, scallions, and parsley. Stir in 3/4 cup of the mayonnaise. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix in the remaining 1/4 cup of mayonnaise and/or another 4 ounces of salami if desired.

Spread on crackers, use as a sandwich filling (perhaps on some freshly baked, easy to make Farmhouse White Bread?), or simply eat it straight out of a little dish with a spoon. It tastes even better if made ahead of time and allowed to chill for a couple of hours before serving.

© FarmgirlFare.com, the mellow yellow foodie farm blog where these days farm fresh eggs are what's for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and occasional snacks—and of course they also find their way into lots of scrumptious baked goods, too.