Consider using ingredients from your pantry and spice shelf if you’ll be dyeing eggs for Easter this year.

When used with white vinegar to set the colors, onion skins, shredded cabbage, carrot tops and pomegranate juice can result in pretty colored eggs whether you use white eggs or brown ones. Eggs are a versatile food with only about 70 calories and offering 6 grams of protein along with Vitamin K, riboflavin, selenium and iodine.

Food-safety issues and the higher price of eggs have made plastic eggs the choice for many egg hunts this year, but colored eggs are an Easter tradition that can brighten a table and be used in recipes for meals. Today’s recipe is great for any meal and can be put together quickly with hard-cooked eggs.

Hard-cooked, unpeeled eggs can be safely stored in a sealable hard-sided container in the refrigerator for up to one week. Don’t leave them out at room temperature for more than two hours.

To dye eggs with natural ingredients, start setting aside the papery skins from your onions to accumulate several cups of skins — red, brown and yellow. With them, you can make pretty marbled eggs and dye others to nice shades of yellow-brown or red. Also, save lemon and orange skins and carrot tops for yellow eggs, and use fresh or frozen spinach for green eggs. For pink eggs, use cranberry juice in place of water.

Save the egg cartons for drying your eggs and buy white vinegar if none is on hand in your pantry.

Vinegar helps to lower the pH so the dye binds to the eggshells. Even if you use a commercial egg dye, you’ll need to add vinegar or another acid such as lemon juice.

Set aside a couple of hours to cook and dye your eggs as the end of the month approaches. Plan whether you’ll color them while cooking, or start with hard-cooked eggs. You can also use food coloring to dye your eggs.

Hot water will result in more intense colors but may soak through to color the egg white, so consider how you’ll be using the finished eggs.

Natural colors

The amounts that follow will color six eggs in a quart of hot water to which 2 tablespoons of white vinegar have been added.

Orange: 4 tablespoons of paprika

Blue: 4 cups of shredded red cabbage or canned blueberries

Red: 4 cups of red onion skins OR heated pomegranate juice in place of water

Pink: 4 cups of shredded beets OR hot cranberry juice in place of water

Green: 4 cups of spinach, fresh or frozen

Ochre: 4 cups of dry outer onion skins

Pale yellow: 4 cups orange or lemon peels or carrot tops with ground cumin added

Mocha: 1 quart of strongly brewed hot coffee in place of water

Instructions:

Add dye ingredients to a pot with eggs and bring to a boil.

Turn heat to low, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

The motion of the eggs in the liquid will assure an even color.

Cold dip method

Combine dye materials, vinegar and water and simmer for 20 minutes, then drain, reserving liquid and cool. Dip hard-cooked eggs in the dye until the desired color is achieved, soaking for 5 minutes to several hours in the refrigerator. Dry on paper towels.

Marbled eggs

Wrap uncooked eggs in onion skins of different colors or spinach leaves. Use string to secure the wrap on the eggs and place them in the toe of an old stocking. Place in simmering water for 20 minutes. Leave the eggs wrapped as they cool.

Perfect hard-cooked eggs

For perfect hard-cooked eggs that peel easily and have tender whites and smooth yellow yolks, prick the large end of each egg with a pin. This provides an escape for the air inside and prevents cracking.

Place eggs in a deep saucepan in a single layer and cover with hot water by 1 inch.

Set the pan over low heat and bring water to a low simmer. Place lid on the pan and remove from heat.

Let the eggs sit for 15 minutes.

Prepare a bowl of ice water with plenty of ice cubes.

Place eggs in the ice water for 4 minutes, then dry them off and place in the refrigerator.

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Recipe

Eggs Gratin with Bechamel Sauce, Ham and Mushrooms

(Serves 4 to 6)

Ingredients

5 hard-cooked eggs, sliced

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon flour

1 cup milk

1 large oyster mushroom, stem removed and sliced

2 slices of ham, cut up

¼ cup cream

⅓ cup Gruyere cheese

Chopped chives

Nutmeg

Freshly ground pepper

Parmesan cheese

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400.

Melt butter over low heat in a saucepan.

Whisk in flour, whisking until cooked.

Slowly add milk and continue whisking until it thickens.

Stir in cream.

Stir in sliced mushroom.

Set aside.

Place sliced eggs in the bottom of a casserole.

Add shredded cheese and chopped ham over the sliced eggs.

Sprinkle mixture with freshly ground pepper and a little nutmeg.

Pour cream sauce over the top.

Sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese on top.

Place in the oven for 10 minutes.

Serve.

— Adapted from a Jacques Pepin recipe

David G. Savage | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

The Supreme Court’s anti-abortion majority is set to consider whether to order a reversal in U.S. drug laws and restrict women from obtaining abortion medication at pharmacies or through the mail.

A ruling to restrict the most common method of abortion would limit the rights of women in California and other states where abortion remains legal.

“We may have thought we were protected because California is supportive of abortion, but this decision [on abortion pills] will be national in scope,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics at UC San Francisco.

The case is the most significant abortion question to come before the court since it overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

In that Dobbs ruling two years ago, the 5-4 majority sought to reassure those who live in states where abortion remains protected. Judges should not make the rules on abortion, they said, promising to return “that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

But that pledge faces a major test. Conservative judges in Texas have shown themselves very willing to rewrite the rules for abortion medication and to impose their rules in blue states.

Whether they prevail now depends on the three conservative justices appointed by President Trump who were crucial to overturning Roe vs. Wade: Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. If all three join with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, they could roll back the use of abortion pills.

“It could eliminate telemedicine and reimpose the in-person dispensing requirement,” Grossman said. “It could also set a very bad precedent for the FDA.”

Several years after the drug mifepristone had been legalized in much of Europe, the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 approved its use as a safe and effective means of ending an early pregnancy. Since 2016, the agency has liberalized its regulations to permit patients to consult a doctor through telemedicine and to obtain the pills without traveling to a clinic. It is now part of a two-drug combination accounting for more than half of U.S. abortions.

When taken in combination with misoprostol, the pills cause cramping and some bleeding. It can sometimes require a doctor’s intervention to complete the abortion, but the FDA says serious complications are “exceedingly rare,” noting that more than 5 million women in the U.S. have used the medication since 2000.

More than a dozen major medical groups, led by the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the American Medical Assn., said in friend-of-the court briefs that two decades of studies have shown the drugs are safe.

“When used in medication abortion, major adverse events — significant infection, excessive blood loss or hospitalization — occur in less than .32% of patients,” they wrote.

On Tuesday, however, the court will hear a broad attack on the FDA from attorney Erin M. Hawley, the wife of Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and a former law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts. She says the court should not turn “a blind eye to FDA’s patently unreasonable actions here, which jeopardize women’s health throughout the nation.”

Hawley is not representing women who say they were injured by the drugs or doctors who prescribe the medication. Instead, she is representing a group of doctors who oppose abortion on religious and moral grounds.

She argues they have legal standing to sue the FDA because some of the group’s members work in emergency rooms, and they could be forced to treat patients who took abortion pills and went to a hospital because of bleeding or other complications.

“When faced with these emergencies, [the doctors] have no choice but to provide immediate treatment, even though this kind of participation in an elective abortion harms their consciences and injures them in other ways,” Hawley wrote in her brief to the court.

Shortly after the Supreme Court repealed the right to abortion in the Dobbs case, Hawley filed a lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, seeking the repeal of the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.

The location was no accident. Her suit would come before U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has been an outspoken foe of same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. Kacsmaryk had served as deputy general counsel for First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative nonprofit that works on religious freedom cases, and had criticized the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision before its reversal.

In past decades, conservatives often railed against “judicial activism” and judges who “legislate from the bench.” In recent years, however, conservative activists have gone before judges in red states seeking to win major changes in the law that they could not win from Congress or the White House.

As predicted, Kacsmaryk handed down a broad ruling against what he called “chemical abortion” and ordered the FDA “to suspend” its approval of the drugs. In a ruling using language common to anti-abortion groups, Kacsmaryk said the studies submitted by the FDA did not convince him mifepristone was safe.

The government rushed to appeal last April, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed to limit Kacsmaryk’s ruling. By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court said it was too late to unravel the approval of the drug in 2000, but not too late to overturn the FDA’s regulations that since 2016 have made it easier for women to obtain the pills.

Biden administration Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth B. Prelogar called the case a first.

She said it “marks the first time any court has restricted access to an FDA-approved drug by second-guessing FDA’s expert judgment about the conditions required to assure that drug’s safe use.”

She urged the Supreme Court to put the lower court rulings on hold, and the justices did so over dissents by Thomas and Alito. A few months later, the court agreed to rule in the case of FDA vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

Abortion-rights advocates are troubled the case has gotten so far.

Protestors demonstrate at the March for Reproductive Rights organized by Women’s March L.A. on April 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. The march was organized in response to a Texas federal judge’s ruling to rescind FDA approval of the abortion pill Mifepristone. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance and speech at the event. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/TNS)

“This makes a mockery of our legal system,” said Julia Kaye, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is a group of anti-abortion extremists going before a hand-picked judge and using junk science and sham claims about women’s health to serve their true goal of making abortion inaccessible.”

The solicitor general, representing the FDA, will urge the court to end the case quietly by throwing out the lawsuit.

Usually, the court has said plaintiffs have standing to sue over a law or regulation only if they are or will be personally injured by it.

The anti-abortion doctors who sued “do not prescribe mifepristone, and FDA’s actions allowing other providers to prescribe the drug do not require them to do or refrain from doing anything,” Prelogar wrote in her brief to the court. They “have not identified even a single doctor among their thousands of members who has ever been required to perform an abortion in the decades mifepristone has been on the market.”

___

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Elise Takahama | (TNS) The Seattle Times

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have unveiled a new type of blood test used to detect colorectal cancer, with high hopes not only in its ability to reduce barriers to testing for this particular disease, but also potentially pave the way for many other types of cancer screenings.

The study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed results from nearly 8,000 people throughout the country between ages 45 and 84 and compared results of their blood tests to those of a colonoscopy. In all, the new test accurately detected colorectal cancer 83% of the time, which is “at least equal and maybe better than” a commonly used stool-based detection test, said Dr. William Grady, medical director of Fred Hutch’s gastrointestinal cancer prevention program and who led the study.

“We have a lot of people who are dying from a preventable cancer,” Grady said. “And the reason is they’re not doing colon cancer screenings. This is a real opportunity to improve that and prevent those deaths. That’s why I get excited about it.”

Colorectal cancer is the third-most diagnosed cancer and second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths among adults in the U.S., according to the paper. About 53,000 people are expected to die from the disease this year. Colorectal cancer is also increasingly being detected in younger people, with 20% of 2019 diagnoses in patients under 55 — almost double the rate reported in 1995, according to the American Cancer Society.

The trend prompted the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which regulates and makes recommendations when to complete certain screenings, in 2021 to lower the age to begin colon cancer testing to 45, five years earlier than previously recommended.

While researchers are still trying to understand what’s driving the change, higher obesity rates, more sedentary lifestyles and diets that include more processed foods are likely contributors, Grady said.

But early detection can significantly increase survival rates — jumping from 14% among those with metastatic cancer to a five-year survival rate of about 91% among those diagnosed at early stages, according to the Guardant Health-funded study. Still, just 59% of those eligible for screenings get tested.

“I think this is an enormous breakthrough,” said Dr. Rachel Issaka, a Fred Hutch gastroenterologist and colorectal cancer researcher who co-authored the paper. “We have another tool in our arsenal that allows people to have a noninvasive and easy way to potentially complete colon cancer screening.”

She noted the new test does not replace the colonoscopy, which identifies and removes precancerous lesions, and remains the “gold standard” for colon cancer screenings and prevention. But because the more involved procedure isn’t always easily accessible to everyone, especially communities of color and lower-income populations, Issaka is optimistic the new option can help boost screening rates and, ultimately, lower deaths.

Because blood tests are generally more convenient, relatively painless and have minimal risk involved, cancer researchers, including Grady, have considered it for decades as a tool in cancer detection, he said. Testing and analysis techniques, however, weren’t ever sophisticated enough to make it a realistic option, Grady said.

Then two “really big breakthroughs” came along, he said.

The first had to do with scientists’ ability to extract tumor cells’ DNA from the blood and process it, which has been developed and optimized over the last decade.

The second milestone involved “next-generation sequencing,” or analyzing DNA in ways that were sensitive enough to detect the rare tumor DNA present in the blood, Grady said. This sequencing has “rapidly advanced over the last 20-plus years,” including in ways to identify potential biomarkers, he added.

Next-generation sequencing hasn’t yet been widely used in cancer detection tests, but Grady’s excitement about the possibilities was evident.

“I think this [colon cancer] test is going to usher in a wave of other types of screening tests,” he said, pointing to ongoing clinical trials that screen people at risk for lung cancer and research around breast cancer blood tests. “Could you replace mammograms with this? I’m going to guess those types of studies will be coming out in the next few years.”

Despite enthusiasm around new technologies — including artificial intelligence’s role in more efficient data analysis — Issaka stressed an importance to pay attention to how these and future tests are rolled out in clinical spaces. It’s always the hope these interventions improve disparities, she said, but “it could also have unintended consequences of widening disparities if we’re not careful.”

Issaka’s lab at Fred Hutch keeps this mission at the heart of its work, specifically focusing on identifying and introducing solutions that reduce racial and ethnic disparities and improve colorectal cancer outcomes. Black and Indigenous communities, for example, report disproportionately high rates of colon cancer diagnosis and deaths, in part because of inadequate screenings, Issaka said.

“If people have more options that are convenient for them, they are more likely to participate in colon cancer screening, and we can pick up earlier cases where treatments are most effective,” she said.

In the past several years, her team has explored a number of strategies, including a program that mails stool-based tests (also known as Fecal Immunochemical Tests, or FIT) to 15,000 to 20,000 Seattle-area homes per year. The program identifies people eligible for colon cancer screenings, and checks in with patients to ensure they’re completing the tests. If someone has an abnormal result, the team works with them to schedule a follow-up colonoscopy.

Because transportation has also been identified as a common barrier to receiving a colonoscopy, Issaka’s team partnered with a service to coordinate rides for patients to and from their procedure.

At a recent community screening and educational event in the Central District, feedback from nearly 150 attendees was “overwhelmingly positive” in learning about the disease and how to find resources, Issaka said. The annual workshop, this year partnered with the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, provided information on what symptoms are, ways to reduce risk and how to get up-to-date with screenings, she added.

“Our goal is to bring as much awareness about this disease to these communities as possible,” Issaka said.

The blood test is still awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, but Grady expects it should receive the endorsements this year.

___

©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

While the rest of the world was in the throes of the pandemic, Valletta Howard was wrapping her mind around a breast cancer diagnosis.

After finding a lump in her left breast in April 2021, she confirmed it with a mammogram and ultrasound in May 2021. It was invasive ductal carcinoma, grade 2, she recalled. Two weeks later, Howard underwent outpatient surgery to have it removed. She was optimistic that she wouldn’t have to endure chemotherapy or radiation. But the medical professionals sent the tissue sample out for testing, and chemotherapy and radiation became a reality.

“It was a big shock. I was not ready for that due to the fact in October 2020, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So from October 2020 up until May, when I found out I had breast cancer, I was helping her go through her treatment,” Howard said. “(Initially) she was happy that I didn’t have to go through chemo because she had gone through it herself. Then when I had to start chemo, she started taking care of me. When I found out I had to have chemo, my mom was devastated because she didn’t want me to go through what she had went through.”

The Austin resident endured chemo once a week, every other week, from August through December of 2021, and 30 days of radiation four days a week after that.

On the heels of Howard’s cancer journey, Dr. Kent Hoskins, professor of oncology at University of Illinois Chicago, wants to make sure a test that’s often used to decide whether breast cancer patients should get chemotherapy is as effective for Black women as it is for other populations.

Hoskins, the senior author of a recent study published in the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and other researchers found the oncotype test, which tests tumor tissue for a group of 21 genes, could be problematic. The commonly ordered biomarker test is used to guide doctors’ recommendations for patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer and helps identify which tumors are likely to be most aggressive; that translates to who makes a good candidate for chemotherapy. Hoskins said such a test may be making bad recommendations for some Black women, leading them to forgo chemotherapy when it might have helped.

“We know there is underrepresentation of Black women in trials that were used to develop this test; we know that Black women are more likely to have biologically aggressive tumors and that there are differences in tumor biology,” Hoskins said. “That concerns us that maybe this test is not fully and accurately reflecting prognoses for Black women.”

Researchers conducted analyses on a national database that included test results and death records for more than 70,000 women with early-stage, estrogen receptor-positive tumors. Although more research needs to be done, the exploratory investigation found the test’s cutoff point for recommending chemotherapy for Black women should be lowered.

Researchers and Hoskins suspect the cause of the treatment gap is due to Black women’s tumors being less likely to respond to estrogen-blocking pills than tumors in other women. So chemotherapy would help improve outcomes for Black women more than it would for women who benefit from the pills alone, Hoskins said.

The UIC team is continuing to add to the research. Previous research found that although Black women are more likely than white women to get triple-negative breast cancer, they aren’t more likely to die from it. Yet they are more likely to die from the more common estrogen-receptor-positive form. And while much attention has been paid to the negative outcomes for Black women who have triple-negative breast cancer, that type of cancer makes up only about 20% of breast cancer cases for Black women, Hoskins said.

“Remember that all women are getting endocrine therapy, and some got chemotherapy in addition,” Hoskins said. “What we’re looking at is how much better is the survival rate if you add chemotherapy versus the endocrine therapy alone. The difference was greater in young Black women in particular compared to young white women. Now the question becomes: Is that because the chemotherapy works better, or because the endocrine therapy doesn’t work as well in Black women? Either one of those would give you a bigger difference.

“This needs to be confirmed with additional study, but in our study, the chemotherapy effect appeared the same,” Hoskins said. “What appeared to be different was how well the endocrine therapy worked. It looks like it doesn’t work as well in Black women. Therefore, if you give chemotherapy, you can overcome that, negate that difference.”

Endocrine therapy slows or stops the growth of hormone-sensitive tumors by blocking the body’s ability to produce hormones. Chemotherapy, which is usually given intravenously, uses drugs to destroy cancer cells and prevent tumor growth.

Valletta Howard, right, and her mother, Loverjean Fairman, in a photo from October 2021, when they were both battling cancer. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Hoskins said the UIC study shines a light on what happens years later, if inclusion and diversity is not in the mix when data is being collected in clinical trials: The exclusionary deficits snowball. He said everyone needs to work harder to improve inclusion in research, funding and pharmaceutical areas.

“If you have underrepresentation in the original trial, not only can it potentially skew the results of the original trial, but what has happened more and more is people trying to leverage information from one trial for other purposes,” Hoskins said. “You just magnify the problem. Now we have a test that was developed and validated in populations that do not reflect the U.S. population demographically, and in particular, that have underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority women.

“If there were no differences in anything, then that wouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “But there are differences. We’re assuming that a test developed in one population is going to perform exactly the same in other populations, which maybe that’s true, but good chances are it’s not true.”

A new initiative by the Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Foundation is trying to rectify underrepresentation in cancer clinical trials. The Chicago Breast Cancer Research Consortium is a partnership among University of Chicago Medicine, the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, and RUSH University System for Health. The consortium will allow patients to participate in drug trials previously unavailable to them without leaving their own providers. It will create a network of trial sites that diversifies the patient pool.

The Chicago Department of Public Health commended the consortium for its joint initiative to improve access to clinical trials, particularly for minority populations and those who face barriers to participation.

“This focus reflects CDPH’s own investments in comprehensive breast health programs that, through partners, provide screening mammograms, navigation support and innovative community outreach to Black and Latina women,” said Dr. Olusimbo Ige, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.

The Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Foundation is giving the initiative $1.8 million in an attempt to remove barriers for those who cannot afford to participate in trials. Part of the donation will be earmarked for expenses like travel and child care to ensure equity among all cancer patients.

“This might be a lifeline and also a ray of hope,” said Laura Sage, co-chair of the Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Foundation. “2024 is about putting the infrastructure in place. We do really want to launch at least one trial in 2024, but the aspiration is to have at least three to five trials by 2026.”

Dr. Rita Nanda, director of breast oncology at UChicago Medicine; Dr. William Gradishar, chief of hematology and oncology at Northwestern Medicine; and Dr. Ruta Rao, oncologist and medical director at RUSH University Cancer Center, are all on board with handling the consortium at their respective institutions.

Nanda said the infrastructure for the network will be housed at the University of Chicago, but all three colleagues will work collaboratively as part of a steering committee to enroll patients in the trials and help implement the research and design.

“Our goal is to focus on those who are underrepresented in clinical trials,” Nanda said. “We have a real opportunity here with the diversity that we’ve got in Chicago to improve on that. We’re starting with the three academic centers in the city that already have the infrastructure to do trials. We’ll start there, and try to build.

“My hope is that we’re going to see some great success in the first couple years,” Nanda said. “And then we can reach out to other organizations in the Chicagoland area, not just in the city, but beyond, wherever patients may want to participate in trials.”

Sage envisions the consortium expanding beyond the three institutions, and perhaps being a model for other areas.

“Breast cancer, like all other cancers, is not just one disease; the more data sampling we can get, the more that we can help patients,” Sage said.

Howard, who will be on medication for six to seven more years to make sure the cancer stays at bay, said she is open to participating in a study.

“I caught it early on,” she said. “I’m an advocate now. When anybody talks about breast cancer, I do put it out there for people, family, friends, everybody: ‘Don’t wait; go immediately.’ A lot of women don’t do it. I was lucky.”