Spring & Easter

My adopted home town, Bethlehem, PA calls itself the Christmas City, a title that, in fact, it shares with a number of other cities named not only Bethlehem but Santa Claus (Arizona) and Jolly (Kentucky). But there is another title that belongs to this city alone: Bethlehem, PA is the home of the Peep.

Living in Bethlehem means that just about all of your holidays will be celebrated in the shadow of the Peep. Want to see a movie at the city’s only indie theater during Christmas week? First you’ll have to wend your way around a fifteen-foot- tall tree made entirely of green Peep chicks. As for New Year’s Eve, you can celebrate by watching a giant (85 pound) yellow Peep drop, as fireworks go off in the background. Of course, Easter is the academy-award season of the Peep, and who will ever forget the local paper’s front-page coverage of the Passion-Week diorama in which all roles were played by Peeps?

Bethlehem, PA is the site of JustBorn, where the iconic Easter candy came into its own. Sam Born, the company’s founder, moved his candy manufacturing and retail business from Brooklyn, NY to Bethlehem in 1932. In 1953, JustBorn acquired the Rodda Candy Company, “known for its jelly bean technology.” Even more important, Rodda also produced, “a small line of marshmallow products that interested the JustBorn family.”

From tomatoes to tiaras, Southerners are notorious for celebrating a crop with a beauty queen. There's Miss Vidalia Onion, Miss Georgia Peach, Miss Georgia Peanut, Miss Sweet Potato and my personal favorite Miss Jiggy Piggy.

Ok, I know there is no such thing as a crop called 'jiggy piggy' but these pageants are are always followed by a festival of fine food. Miss Jiggy Piggy represents the Pig Jig in Vienna, the biggest barbeque festival in Georgia.

I read a lot of newspapers from all over, even a lot of local newspapers and whenever I see a picture of a girl with a tiara on her head holding long stem red roses my eyes get big and my mouth starts watering.

Looking for ways to use up Easter egg-hunt leftovers? Make an egg salad sandwich. Actually, make several egg salad sandwiches, one for each day this week, because today marks the start of National Egg Salad Week in the U.S. Yup. We love egg salad so much that we devote an entire week in its honor.

Our love for egg salad sandwiches runs deep, all the way to 1896. That's when one of the earliest printed recipes for a sandwich made with egg salad appeared in The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, written by Fannie Merritt Farmer. Then with the introduction of sliced soft white bread in the 1930s, egg salad sandwiches became a brown-bag lunch staple as well as a common item at delis, diners, and cafeterias.

It's no surprise that the majority of egg salad sandwiches are eaten after Easter when many people are looking for tasty ways to use up Easter egg-hunt leftovers. While there are various ways to make egg salad, I favor grandma's fuss-free version: tangy, sweet, and creamy.

As Spring slowly arrives in Maine and the snow stubbornly retreats, I push back the compost covering my rhubarb patch that has been growing for as long as I can remember. The day is sunny and kinda’ warm, what that means around here is, the mid fifties.

The air smells alive, the birds are flying happily and my rhubarb is poking through the winter protective covering. With the spring rain it will grow at lightning speed and keep growing as I madly pull at it to make many Spring and early Summer treats. 

In my house this is the first pie of the year and the first food out of our garden, making us dream of what pies lie ahead, small sweet strawberries, fragrant raspberries and mounds of wild Maine blueberries. But today we “make do” with rhubarb....