Easter Eats.

Happy Easter! Holy week and Easter week have been rather bustling with activity, even though we did try to keep it rather quiet…

It turns out we really do like having people over and feeding them so in spite of having decided to just have a family Easter we changed our minds on Holy Thursday and ended up with 3 guests, a prime rib roast, rainbow salad, tiny roasted yams, carrot cake shaped like a bunny and friends bringing delicious Persian food and bakery bread and fancy petit-fours. Truly fancy local beers, red wine and “race-car cola” rounded things off nicely.

We skipped my family tradition of making bunny-shaped orange bread for breakfast with excellent intentions of just moving it over to the 2nd Sunday of Easter, but that ended up not happening, so we’ll just try and get around to it sometime between now and Pentecost. Easter is a season, may as well take advantage of it!

We did manage to make time to dye eggs on Holy Saturday though (between getting Sirocco and Kyle new Easter hats and trying to get people to nap before the vigil). Neon-food colouring on hard-boiled eggs, with elastic bands and wildflowers as resists. Nothing too fussy, the kids are young. It was pretty fun and they thought it was absolutely magical. Mistral just stared and said WOOOOW!

We ate those and fancy rhubarb yogurt for breakfast before sending the kids out to hunt for candy filled eggs in the yard.

She was more excited about the Easter grass in her basket than finding eggs…

Dinner was simple cooking, but tasty ingredients.Prime rib with salt and pepper, seared in the cast iron pan before going on the BBQ for a nice low and slow cooking. The key here is really to get the nicest meat you can afford. We don’t get this cut often, but when we do there’s no fancy rubs, no marinating, just making sure not to overcook it. Yams small and smooth, brushed with oil and tossed in a hot oven until tender. Rainbow salad (Sirocco’s favourite) red cabbage, baby spinach, yellow bell peppers, crated carrots, radishes and red peppers, carefully arrayed in a baking pan by your handy household 3 year old, sweet maple-poppy seed dressing drizzled at the table. It’s easy. It’s good food.

The bunny cake was this recipe more or less exactly decorated like a lovely spread we saw in the latest issue of Marie Claire Idées, my absolute favourite magazine. The round we used was a bit too shallow, even with two layers to give enough height to the bunny’s face, so I cut them in half and had four half-circle layers. The kid was satisfied and it looked quite nice from the front, if a little odd from the back.

Easter Monday we took a cooking break, walked over to the neighbouring bakery for chocolate hot cross buns, grabbed the leftover boiled eggs and let the kids play in the park. It was all in all a lovely and delicious weekend.

How was your Easter meal? Do you have strong food traditions?