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.
I love all French desserts and confections, but one of my most favorites is the macaron. Available in countless colors and flavors, macarons are very popular in France. In Paris, customers line up to buy them at many famous pastry shops, such as Dalloyau or Ladurée, which invented the double-decker sandwiched macaron in 1930. Since Paris is a bit too far for me to travel, I usually buy them at Bouchon Bakery in New York. I love all the flavors they offer even though their selection is not as wide as in France. But for me it doesn't matter, because the chocolate macaron is what I consider to be the best.
My mother thought organized religion was one of the problems with the world, this extended to the Girl Scouts and the PTA (a somewhat convenient belief for a mother of 4, since you can’t ask someone to go against their beliefs). She also believed that children shouldn’t be allowed to act.
I love soccer so I get really excited when I go to visit my dad in
London where it’s soccer season all year long. England as you probably
know has an undying passion for the sport, they treat it less as a game
and more as a way of life. For example, on a sold out night at
Emirates Stadium after Arsenal scores the crowd collectively expenses
100 times the world’s energy output for a day in the 30 seconds after
the goal. Like baseball or basketball in the US, football in the UK
permeates the culture – it’s everywhere. It has both a light and dark
side, and can go from having fun with your mates to total warfare very
quickly.
Every spring as a kid, I reveled in the same Easter basket filled with
store-bought candy that all of the other kids in the neighborhood tore
into: plastic eggs stuffed with foil-wrapped, peanut butter-filled
chocolates, marshmallows machine-molded into pink bunnies and yellow
chicks, and jelly beans nestled with tiny, speckled malted milk eggs in
whorls of green plastic grass.