"It's not that Easter is really about excess, because it isn't. But we always think it's a lot of fun to have a lot of sides at Sunday dinner even if you just eat a little bit of each one...and since it's a 3-day weekend (or a 5-day weekend for some of us), we figured it was time to get cooking"
Nora Ephron's Apricot Jello Mold
Sauteed Asparagus with Hazelnut Crumble
Broccoli Rabe with Garlic and Hot Pepper
Green Beans with Toasted Almonds
When I think of Easter, I think of pies. Not chocolate bunnies, marshmallow peeps, or colorful Easter eggs, but delicious Italian pies, especially ricotta.
Growing up, my mom always prepared a traditional and labor intensive Easter dinner. In truth, she could have skipped the whole thing and just served her pies. In the week before Easter Sunday, our house became a dairy. The shelves in the second refrigerator in our basement sagged from countless dozens of eggs, pints of cream, pounds of butter, and tubs of ricotta cheese needed for our pie production.
Although it can be made year-round, ricotta pie (torta di ricotta) is an Italian cheesecake that is especially associated with Easter. There are many regional recipes for ricotta pie, some savory and some sweet. Savory versions usually include meats and additional cheeses, while sweet pies are typically flavored with citrus, nuts, and chocolate.
When I called my mom for her recipe last week, I learned that it was Nan's and that it had a storied past. "Nan was the first person in the family to use pineapple instead of citron in her ricotta pie. And boy were her sisters jealous!” I had no idea Nan was a baking maverick.
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.
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.
Genoise Cake with Pastry Cream Filling
Dione Lucas’s Maple Layer Cake
Pecan Pie Cake from the Savannah Candy Kitchen
It’s April 1993, and I have just woken up on the living room couch.
My eyes feel a bit sore from trying to stay awake in order to catch a
certain creature hopping through my home.
Gosh, how I would have loved to have caught that white-haired—or brown-haired animal, red (dye) handed—with a now-naked hardboiled egg on the floor beneath him or her and a half eaten carrot in the opposite paw.
But I didn't catch what I had imagined to be a five-foot, eight-inch bunny, that night. In fact, all I caught was the back of my eye lids, and whatever I dreamt that night (probably sweet succulent dreams of chocolate eggs filled with caramel...
I couldn’t say if it was the year after that—or five years later that I discovered the truth behind the Easter Bunny, but each year I still debate sleeping on that couch, straining my eyes until they can’t take it to catch my five- foot, eight-inch tall mother in the act of hiding an egg behind a picture frame and another behind the pillow of the opposing couch. Was it a coincidence that the bunny I had imagined and my mother were the same height?