Here's What You Can Do With Leftover Hard-Boiled Eggs

Did you go egg-stra crazy with Easter preparations this year? If so, you might be looking at a few cartons of colored eggs you're not sure how to use up. Whatever you do, don't just egg-nore them! The FDA says boiled eggs only last for a week, although the Pioneer Woman website suggests you might be able to keep them for up to 10 days. Still, you'd better make plans for them before that time is up, since letting food go to waste is no yolking matter -– in fact, it's downright in-eggs-cusable.

While hard-boiled eggs are hard to beat (ha!) as a source of protein, they can be a little dull on their own, and after the first few days egg salad sandwiches aren't all they're cracked up to be. If you've eggs-hausted all of your ideas for what to do with your Easter overage, never fear! We're here with a list of egg-cellent ideas to help you out. Also, we promise we're (almost) done with our egg-centric punning. If we crack any more, like the wannabe comedi-hens we are, just feel free to egg-nore them and skip straight to the recipes conveniently outlined in each slide.

Potato salad in its simplest form may consist of little more than boiled potatoes and mayo, but that can get a wee bit boring. If you want to jazz it up, as well as give it a little protein to balance out the carbs and fat, hard-boiled eggs make for a great addition.

For each pound of potatoes you're using in your salad, you can add a boiled egg or two. Boil the potatoes and peel them if you like — or leave the skins on and label the salad as rustic. Cool the potatoes and dice them, then chop up the eggs as well. Mix the eggs and potatoes together along with any additional add-ins you like such as chopped celery, pickles, or onions, using mayo to bind everything together. Season with salt, pepper, and maybe some garlic powder, cayenne, or Tabasco sauce. You could even go hog-wild and throw in crumbled bacon for a salty crunch. Once you're done, stick the salad in the fridge for a few hours so all of the flavors can blend into one harmonious whole.

For many of us, IKEA is primarily a restaurant that just happens to have a weird furniture-selling theme going on, like a more elaborate version of the assorted tchotchkes you can buy at Cracker Barrel. While IKEA is justly famed for its meatballs, other popular menu items include bargain-priced hot dogs and a fudgy chocolate cake. Among our favorite IKEA eats, however, are the open-faced sandwiches known as smørrebrød –- particularly the super-tasty egg-and-shrimp combos.

To make a sandwich similar to IKEA's, toast a slice of bread -– rye, wheat, or white will all work. Lightly butter the toast, then top it with lettuce and a sliced-up boiled egg. Arrange some cooked shrimp on top of the eggs, then dress them with a mixture of sour cream and mayonnaise. Add some snipped chives, fresh dill if you like, and a few paper-thin slices of lemon.

Salade Niçoise, as its name implies, is a salad thought to have originated in the French city of Nice located on the postcard-perfect Côte d'Azur. While you may not be able to afford a vacation on the French Riviera, you can eat as if you were gazing out upon the Mediterranean Sea ... and yes, this salad fits nicely into a Mediterranean diet. While people tend to disagree about what ingredients belong in a Niçoise salad, generally most recognize that hard-boiled eggs are an indispensable part of the dish.

Julia Child was the one who introduced salade Niçoise to most American cooks, but her version is fairly complex and calls for both anchovies and capers. For a simpler Niçoise, boil a few potatoes and chop them up into bite-sized chunks. Arrange them on a bed of lettuce along with some peeled and quartered boiled eggs, cherry tomatoes, cooked green beans (preferably not the canned kind), olives, and a can of tuna. Top the salad with a vinaigrette dressing or a mixture of freshly squeezed lemon juice and olive oil.

No Russian or Ukrainian New Year's celebration would be complete without Olivier salad, a dish that was invented by the 19th-century French chef whose name it bears, per Russia Beyond. Lucien Olivier was running a restaurant in Moscow at the time, and he created this dish with Russian palates in mind. He certainly succeeded in doing so, as this salad is now considered a staple of the winter holidays. While the original recipe may have been made with grouse and crayfish, nowadays these have been replaced with more readily obtainable and affordable options such as sausage, chicken, or ham.

To make an Olivier salad, peel and roughly chop a few boiled eggs, then mix them with your cooked meat of choice. Add some green peas (frozen ones work fine, and there's no need to thaw them), chopped boiled carrots and potatoes, green onions, and chopped dill pickles. Bind the salad with mayonnaise, then season it with salt and pepper. If you want to double down on the dill, you can add it as a fresh herb as well.

While pizza as we know it was probably invented in Italy and brought to our shores by Italian immigrants, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on immigration. As it so happens, the country of Brazil has a fairly sizable Italian-Brazilian population (per Statista), and they've evolved their own unique style of pizza that differs in many ways from its North American counterpart. Among the types popular in Brazil is one called atum, which features tuna and onions; another called brócolis with broccoli, bacon, and cream cheese; and a pizza known as Portuguesa which features fresh tomatoes, sausage, ham, onions, peppers, olives, and hard-boiled eggs.

Since we're talking about using up eggs, the Portuguesa pizza is going to be the one of most interest. To make it you'll start off as usual: crust, tomato sauce, mozzarella. Once you've topped the crust with sauce and cheese, layer on some smoked ham, sliced Spanish-style chorizo (this is the kind that resembles pepperoni rather than the loose Mexican style of sausage), sliced fresh tomatoes, sliced yellow onions, chopped green pepper, and whole (but pitted) black or green olives. Season the pizza with oregano and some crushed red pepper if you like it spicy. Bake the pizza until it's done, then top it with sliced boiled eggs.

Empanadas are a food that is popular throughout Latin America, and each country has its own particular preferences with regards to cooking styles, dough, and fillings (via Remezcla). In El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica they like to stuff their empanadas with plantains, while Ecuador goes with a sweet-savory combo: fried cheese inside and sugar outside. In Chile and Argentina, however, empanada fillings often include hard-boiled eggs.

While making empanadas from scratch can be pretty time consuming, we're all for time-saving hacks like using frozen puff pastry or pie dough. For the filling, you'll need to brown ground beef and sauté onions, then mix the two and stir in some raisins and sliced olives (black or green, your choice) along with a pinch or two of salt and pepper. Roughly chop a few boiled eggs and gently fold them into the mixture. Cut out large circles of pastry, pile on a few spoonfuls of filling, then fold the dough over to make half-moons and pinch the edges to seal them. Bake the empanadas at the temperature recommended on the pastry package until they're a nice golden brown.

While every single dish we've covered so far has been savory, it is possible to incorporate boiled eggs into a dessert recipe. While this may sound egg-centric (oops! it just slipped out), Bon Appétit assures us that using hard-boiled eggs in baked goods has been done by bakers in Northern Europe for years. Actually, if you think about it, it's not that weird. Most cookie recipes contain eggs, so what's the big deal if those eggs are cooked before they go into the dough? With that in mind, we present: hard-boiled egg chocolate chip cookies!

If you're using the yolks alone, you can stir a yolk or two into any cookie recipe and it will help keep the dough from becoming too tough. You can also experiment with using cooked eggs in place of raw ones by starting with a very forgiving recipe like one for chocolate chip cookies. Omit the raw egg and replace it with two finely chopped boiled eggs. Be sure not to over-bake the cookies, as the dough is less moist than when using raw eggs, and you risk drying out the final product if it's cooked too long.