Joyful Foodie: Easter 2016

Friday, March 25, 2016

Easter 2016

Easter is such a great holiday. I've seen a lot of naysayers recently complain that it's the new Christmas and ask "when did Easter get so big?" Um, it's kind of a big deal. Christmas has so much pressure to find the perfect gift and has been so commercialized recently, and I hate the arguing about saying "Happy Holidays" or "Merry Christmas" (don't get me started on the red cup hate this year, good grief). Thanksgiving is wonderful but we are always trying to get somewhere in time. We don't really travel for Easter these days. I act like Wendy and collect lost boys around me, many of them from my husband's department, and cook like I'm trying to feed 30 instead of the 3-6 that we usually host. The air is full of promise of warm evenings and bright flowers. All of the trees have bloomed around here and we had the most magnificent sunset tonight, and as I type this at 7:30pm it's still dimly dusk outside.

I love the menu planning process for holidays and dinner parties. I love skimming fine cooking, my cookbook shelves, pinterest, and old menu pages from previous years, remembering joyful moments shared with friends and family, laughing to myself about recipes that flopped, getting hungry remembering the delightful surprises and wild successes.

This is my menu this year. I've dropped a side, added a side, rotated back to a harder version of another one, retreated to the comfortable familiarity of popovers (unlike the awful dinner rolls I tried last year), and of course, I kept the carrot cake.