Spring & Easter

In a true southern kitchen, Coca-Cola is not only found in the refrigerator, it's also found in the pantry. You are more likely to find a few cans of Coke stashed with the flour and sugar than you are to find a bottle of balsamic vinegar. We marinate ham with it, make barbeque sauce out of it, add it to baked beans and even bake cakes with it.

I have been convinced for years that someday I will be discovered by a Coke executive in a hotel at 5 am, as I am standing by a Coke machine in my pajamas, or what I refer to as my 'almost pajamas,' a line of clothing I am going to design someday for those of us who start our day wandering around the halls searching for a Coke machine. It would be a perfect commercial.

I am not a fan of cake. I like chocolate cake but prefer to eat the chocolate that goes into the cake as the flour and butter do nothing but dilute the chocolate. Why waste the calories on the other ingredients when you can instead, just eat more chocolate?

My mother is a terrific cook, but she never made cakes. She would buy those dry, tasteless cakes with the icky icing from the grocery store and put some candles on it and that would be my birthday cake. When I got older she found an elderly lady who lived next door to my grandmother who makes a pretty good chocolate cake even though I was never too thrilled about it.

What's Easter without Easter eggs? Hide them. Roll them. And, best of all, eat them. Of the many dishes associated with Easter, deviled eggs have always been high on my list. Traditional deviled eggs are delicious but with some adventuresome spices, hardboiled Easter eggs take center stage on this festive occasion.

Our fingers stained blue, red and yellow, my sister and I loved dyeing and decorating Easter eggs. Our parents would hide the eggs around the house and outside. I'd race against my sister, each of us hoping to find more than the other.

Ultimately when we had delivered the eggs back into the kitchen, our mother turned our colored eggs into deviled eggs with a simple recipe: peel off the shells, cut the eggs in half and remove the yolks. Chop up the yolks, add a bit of mayonnaise, season with salt and pepper and spoon the mixture back onto the egg white halves.

When were kids those flavors were good enough. But for my adult palate, deviled eggs need spicing up. With experimentation, I discovered that doing something as simple as adding cayenne or Mexican chili ancho powder gives mild-mannered eggs a mouth-pleasing heat. Sweeten the flavor up a notch by stirring in finely chopped currants or borrow from Indian cuisine and mix in curry powder that has first been dry roasted in a sauté pan.

Since Easter is all about sweets, we like to ask our friends and family to bring a dessert to Easter dinner. Here's some of our favorites.

Brown Sugar Lightning Cake

Hershey's Chocolate Cake

Genoise Cake with Pastry Cream Filling

Grandma Hazel's Lemon Cake

Dione Lucas’s Maple Layer Cake

Pecan Pie Cake from the Savannah Candy Kitchen

White Chocolate Amaretto Pound Cake

Pear Pie

Lindy's New York Cheesecake

Katharine Hepburn's Brownies

This week, Italian women everywhere will be knee deep in eggs, butter, sugar, and ricotta cheese -- it's time for making Easter pies. Easter, as with most holidays for Italians, is a time for culinary celebration.

Both sweet and savory pies are a hallmark of an Italian Easter.  Every year my grandmother made countless delicious Easter pies. And every year starting several weeks before Easter, anyone who even remotely knew her would start visiting or calling her. Their motive: to butter her up enough to get a piece of her Pizza Chena.

Nan, as my mother would say, "was dumb as a fox;" she knew when people were only after her Pizza Chena, and she wasn't going to give it to just anybody. That's because it was time-intensive and expensive to make. Of course, her mailman always got a piece because he would tell Nan that of all the Italian women in the neighborhood her Pizza Chena was the best. (Not too subtle, but it worked every time.)

Since Nan moved into an Alzheimer's unit several years ago, we haven't had Pizza Chena. It's one of a few dishes that my mom lost the desire to make after Nan wasn't able to cook anymore. So my mom was both delighted and nostalgic when I called her for the recipe.