Easter Continued

Sunday morning came early, as a bunch of little children were eager to see what the bunny had brought, and to find the dyed eggs he had hidden.  The Easter bunny was still asleep when she heard them tromp down the stairs, and she had to come up with something clever to stop them in their tracks and send them back upstairs while she quickly hid the refrigerated eggs.

“The Easter bunny does not bring treats to children with stinky breath.  Go brush your teeth!!”  They totally bought this line, and dutifully turned tail and ran upstairs to brush their teeth, while I hurled already mostly-broken eggs into various spots around the kitchen and living room in the quickest Easter egg hiding in history.  The other adults were slowly entering the room, blinking away the sleep in their eyes, while the kids thundered back down stairs for the second time and went and found the dyed eggs.  Phew!  Also, it’s a good thing I’m a light sleeper!  After finding the eggs, the kids collected their Easter baskets and shoved their faces full of chocolate and jelly beans, while the adults recovered with bloody  Marys and coffee.  We had pancakes and bacon again, and then settled into a nice relaxing morning.  (We decided to skip Easter church – I went to Maundy Thursday service, and besides it’s so crowded on Easter Sunday.)

I don’t recall that we really did anything at all on Easter except eat and chat.  The kids played out back for a while with their bubbles, and we all sat on the back porch and drank ice water and ate a cheese ball and some hummus (hope we don’t die of listeria!), then everyone went down for naps again.  While everyone (including adults) napped, I organized our Easter meal.  I’ve decided lately that it’s best, for a celebratory feast, to have a couple of fancy things, a couple of easy things, and a couple of out-sourced things.  This lets the cook show off some of her skillz while also not killing herself and ruining the holiday with over-work.  So, here was my Easter feast, which I just loved and I think the rest of the folks did too:

• SOMEWHAT FANCY THING: Pork Loin with apples and onions.  I did not make the gravy in this recipe – we had mushroom gravy already with the grits.  It was quite tasty pork, though, cooked to perfection! *so, I’d planned to make a rosemary pork tenderloin.  I picked up a “tender pork loin” and thought I had it set.  Well, turns out, tender pork loin and pork tenderloin are two entirely different things.  I did not realize this.  Even now, if you google “pork loin recipes”, you get a bunch of pork tenderloin recipes.  Even the internet doesn’t know they are two different things.  Thank heavens I figured it out, because pork loin takes about 2 hours longer to cook than pork tenderloin.  We would’ve had some lonely little sides, sitting on the table waiting for their main meal, if I hadn’t twigged something was up.
• EASY THING: Roast asparagus.  Chop the tough ends of the asparagus, put on a tray, drizzle liberally in olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and then roast in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes.
• OUT-SOURCED THING: Brown ‘n serve rolls.
• EASY THING: berry fruit salad.  Literally just wash some berries – raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and cut up strawberries – and put them in a bowl.  Savannah picked all the raspberries out, Craig picked all the blueberries out, the big boys ate all the strawberries, and we adults split the blackberries.  It was a win win, though I kind of think I should have just skipped the “making a fruit salad” part and just parceled out the preferred berry to each person.
• FANCY THING: Grits souffle with mushroom gravy.  OK ya’ll, I saw this in Southern Living and was all over it.  I have never made a souffle – I hear so many horror stories of them collapsing that I never wanted to try it.  Well, I will definitely  make this again – it was easier than I thought it would be, and whipping egg whites into a froth and then folding them into the grits made me feel sorta fancy.  Next time I will probably add hot sauce to the grits, and use a different cheese (Vern recommended sharp cheddar, and I am inclined to do half cheddar and half Gouda, plus sprinkle a bit of Parmesan).  You must make the gravy – the grits alone don’t have a lot of depth, but with this sherry-gravy on top, OMG!  Plus the gravy worked well with the pork, too.
• OUT-SOURCED THING: For dessert we had a chocolate doberge cake (pronounced dough-bah-dj).  I did not make it, I bought it.  Memories of my strawberry mousse cake disaster from Easter past (same guests! different year!) made me re-think my dessert making skills.  No regrets – this doberge cake, which I picked up in the bakery section of our locally-owned grocery store, was perfect.

We ate dinner, then took the children to a nearby park for them to run off some steam.  Then we came home and had doberge cake, and then it was time to put the kids to bed one last time.  I feel asleep more or less instantly on the couch – I hated it, but it had been a long weekend and I had an 8am conference call on Monday morning with a pretty important client, so I needed to be well rested and not hungover.  The Professor stayed up a bit later and chatted with the guests while I went up and crashed out.  Monday morning we all got up fairly early, and I talked with the friends a few more minutes before hopping on my call at home in our home office.  (That way I didn’t have to get out of the house by 7am to get to work in time to take it.)  Our dear friends started on their epic journey back north, and I started on another week.

It was such a great visit!  The only thing that would have been better is if I hadn’t had that 8 am conference call first thing monday morning . . . but what are you gonna do??  All in all, it was a relaxing and fun weekend, we probably ate too much and definitely drank too much, but got lots of time to chat and catch up and enjoy.  And the kids enjoyed one another, too, which I very much loved.  Great times.

**Edited to add some random pix from the season.