Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Hoppy Easter Food

So, I had some time this weekend to dedicate to cooking. Yum. I made several items to take to our Easter feast at my sisters. She supplied the ham, potatoes, and home. And these are the items I brought.




  • Can't go wrong with Rice Krispy treat eggs (use an actual plastic Easter egg to shape and voila!
  • Call it a crazy Pennsylvania Dutch tradition--I don't know where it comes from--but we ALWAYS had pickled beets and hard boiled eggs at our Easter feasts growing up. I'm sorry if beets offend you, but really, they are delicious. Have you ever tried a pickled beet? Then don't hate.
  • I tried out this recipe for "pickled asparagus" as well. It's just asparagus marinated in a vinaigrette and it was tasty. I would recommend using pencil thin asparagus--they just didn't have any at my grocery store at the time. They were still bathing at the time of this picture (sorry naked asparagus.)









And then there were these beauties--homemade crescent rolls (sorry Pillsbury--I had to demonstrate my true domesticity). Wow, if I do say so myself. Shots are pre-oven and post-oven.





My strawberry pie didn't turn out beautiful because the fluted edge toppled on to the bottom of the crust while baking (and it was supposed to be no fail crust!), but the deliciousness still reigned supreme. And who doesn't like to top it off with a little homemade vanilla whipped cream with tangy cream cheese? Who, I ask you? This recipe is from Cook's Country (America's Test Kitchen), which I can't link because it's a paid recipe site, however, I bet if you google it, you'll find it somewhere--and believe me, it's worth finding somewhere. And the crust was delicious (butter, cream cheese, flour, sugar, salt--no ice water needed) pressed into the dish instead of rolled, I just didn't get the pretty edge attached well enough. Lesson learned. Sometimes food doesn't have to look pretty to taste pretty.

So there it was. By no means perfect. By no means the prettiest. But I sure had fun getting back to my roots in the kitchen. And with that I take all the lessons learned because there was a slight flaw to all the recipes I made. The eggs could have been cooked a minute longer and peeled better. The asparagus should have been thin. The crescents got an extra dose of sugar because I halved everything but forgot when I was dumping sugar--they weren't overly sweet and no one complained, but I knew they could have used a little less sugar and a touch more salt and left to rise overnight instead of refrigerated. And then, well I already discussed the pie.

That's that. Maybe someday in the future when I'm not working two jobs I can be a real food blogger and get a fancy camera and take fancy pictures of all the awesome stuff I make. And also, perhaps not have as many mental errors when making new recipes. But not yet. For now I'll just savor the few moments I get to have in the kitchen...experimenting...creating...ahhh...those are the things I dream about.

2 comments:

LynnieMacKay said...

Dude, if you ever need some outside opinions on your food, I know of a couple of people who would be willing to volunteer their taste buds...

LadyEm said...

Dude, share and share alike. :)