Easter Weekend Highlights
Not only did we get great sunny beautiful weather yesterday, and I got to watch cute kids in their Easter outfits at church, including our favorite Hobbit child in a white hat and gloves, but I'm still pretty much on a high from how well my Easter dinner turned out.
My sister Spitfire and her Special Friend came over for the feast. And for the first time in my roasting life ever, I planned well enough (along with some smiling from the oven gods) so that everything finished cooking at the same time. This never happens for me. Ask anyone I've invited over for dinner ever, and ask them to show you the bite marks on their arms from when they finally became too hungry to wait any longer. The oven gods, unfortunately, were busy somewhere else when my oven started smoking enough to make our normally comatose alarm go off, which startled me so badly that I dropped my half-eaten deviled egg on the carpet. Alarm's lucky I didn't kill it right then. You do NOT mess with my deviled eggs.
This was our menu:
Jamie Oliver's Roast Chicken with Lemon and Rosemary Roast Potatoes (I added carrots and skipped the rosemary. The chicken carcass is in the fridge waiting to be turned into stock.)
Barefoot Contessa's Roasted Broccoli--really is possibly the best broccoli you will ever eat in life
Nem's Deviled Eggs (half garnished with fresh thyme & black pepper, half garnished with nutmeg & sea salt)
Sourdough Bread (the leftovers are waiting to be turned into a goat cheese panini and yes my brow is starting to sweat just thinking about it)
Spitfire's Raspberry Italian Cream Sodas
Spitfire's Chocolate Zucchini Cake (because zuchinni = healthy!)
The table decorations were a bit basic this year. I thought I'd found a nice white clearanced tablecloth for dining room table at Bed, Bath & Beyond earlier in the day, but then when I opened it and put it on the table I started having mental images of really, really crappy polyester temple dresses. It went right back in the bag. Instead contented myself with a vase of pink blossoms stolen from the tree outside my apartment building. The pink flowers + my pink plates = Easter bliss.
The only thing marring the celebration was the starling vs sparrow gang war going on over who gets to nest and poop in my dryer hose. I am not okay with this, especially since I called management last fall and asked them to cover the vent with a grate. They did not do it, and now there are loud bird scuffles in my crinkly, crinkly dryer hose. Expect any time to open the dryer and have a deranged starling fly out into my apartment. Called management and told them they'd better get on it. And they'll know which vent is mine because of all the bird poop stains dripping off it. Grr.
Anyway. What did y'all eat yesterday?
I'm Steph, a librarian and mom of 3 (not sure how that happened). Let's chat books, food, Sumptuous Literary Adaptations, poop, knitting and maybe some crazy Mormon Feminism.
18 comments:
Wow, I'm so hungry now. Thanks a lot. ;)
Ham. To be turned into pea soup. And cheesy potatoes, which are, well, cheesy.
And Aunt ******* brought that green bean casserole, which, well, you know.
But thank goodness for the mouth-watering roasted asparagus and mom's homemade rolls with strawberry freezer jam, because otherwise the dinner would have moaned as loudly as our church service, which included no musical numbers, no Easter lilies (or flowers of any kind) and nothing to differentiate it from any other sac mtg any other day of the year...
Thank you for asking.
I made a really fabulous Greek Salad from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It made me feel all healthy and spiffy for making a salad with fresh ingredients, and that didn't have nasty random shredded bits of carrot and cabbage in it. Also, the olive oil/lemon juice homemade dressing was pretty awesome.
I've been meaning to post about our Easter dinner, but it might be a few days before it gets up online. I went meatless this year, so we had cream of asparagus soup (it was a festive green, but boring in taste), homemade rolls, deviled eggs, and strawberries.
Our church service was also a bit lame, mostly because I'm in a 'married student ward' which means that everyone leaves for holidays. There were only about 10 families there yesterday.
Umm...why are there four hands in the food? Did eveyone just eat out of the pan? Great way to save time on cleaning up.
Sounds like you had a wonderful Easter!!!
Can I just tell you that I soooo looooove Honey Baked TURKEY so much better than I love HOney Baked Ham. Actually I don't even like Honey Banked HAM. Ham is grody. Haha!!
And who knows why I went on that tangent :)
But I did have a very good salad with strawberries in it. Yum yum.
I find it strange to eat pork products on a celebration that was originally connected with a Jewish celebration. So we had lamb chops with an herb sauce, potato salad, a spinach and berry salad, home made rolls and grape juice.
I did the rolls and potato salad Saturday night so on Sunday all we had to do was toss the green salad and cook the lamb.
We were very full of yumminess after.
we haven't had a sparrow fly out of our tumble dryer but we did have a bird fly down our chimney and somehow squeeze out from under the fire place scaring the heck out of me in the process.
We had Giada's Parmesan-Crusted Pork Chops. They were yummy.
My number one favorite Easter food is deviled eggs. My MIL also made roasted asparagus with olive oil and white wine that was just fantastic.
And P.S., we had a good time at Spitfire's place (loved it--never saw it when you lived there!) the other night for book club. You should plan to join us again sometime soon. We MISS you!!
the birds in the dryer hose thing happened to my parents over the weekend. my dad had to take the dryer completely apart and clean out *cough* a dead bird's body and severed head *cough* and re-route the hose out through the roof. good luck! :) sounds like a lovely easter though!
My mother-in-law makes the traditional "ham and potatoes" dinner, but this year I contributed a raspberry cheesecake trifle that was to die for. You might disagree with me on that point though, as it's not made in the classic British tradition (no homemade custard or jam in it). Your chicken looks divine! I read somewhere that roasting a chicken is the "true test of a chef" or some baloney like that, and it looks like you passed with flying colors.
Since a couple of people mentioned the chicken pic, I should confess that THAT particular chicken is Jamie Oliver's and comes from his cookbook. I was in a hurry and didn't write down where I got the image from. But mine TOTALLY looked that good!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAA zucchini cake!
Mine consisted of ham, peach jello with pieces of peach mixed in, gross salad, and delicious bread.
Way better and weirder than yours.
Would you mind posting the recipe for your chocolate zucchini cake? It sounds delicious.
I should've posted my delicious garlic, lemon, marjoram roasted lamb but by the time it was done I was almost dead from a bad cold, staggering, barely alive, to get it from the oven to the table. What was I thinking? And to let my four loyal readers down on such an important occasion. I should be banned from blogging.
As a person whose Easter feasting consisted of a hot cross bun on Thursday at work (didn't even have an Easter egg this year), I am truly jealous.
nothing too exciting to say about the easter meal - i was at my aunt and uncle's house in california and went to their friends' potluck meal. but the easter egg hunt with 5000 (yeah, that's right - five thousand) eggs was pretty fun!
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