A Dry Run at Easter

Our Easter afternoon plans started out ambitious.  We were going to have a bunch of friends over for Easter dinner after church - a couple of families with children and a fine assortment of handcrafted singles had our attendance list up to fourteen, counting us and counting kids.  But then the balloon began to deflate.  One guy had to work.  Another was subjected to familial guilt until he bowed out a broken man to spend the holiday with his family.  An emergency gall badder surgery took another family out of action, then L caught walking pneumonia, which effectively drove the last of our holdout invitees running for the hills.  So what do you do when you're poised and ready to feed an army, but the army is off fighting other wars?  You hold training exercises!

Thoroughly undaunted, we rescheduled everyone for Easter Dinner Part Deux next week, then proceeded to trial run all the recipes we would otherwise have winged.  What we could store for a week we shelved, but the bulk of the dinner was executed to plan.  The menu was roast leg of lamb with a balsamic vinegar glaze, roasted root vegetables (rutabaga, parsnips and carrots) with rosemary, cold steamed asparagus with a curry dipping sauce, and a small bottle of chilled bubbly.  Stacy had also tucked away a special strawberry pie for the occasion.  The exercises were both tactical and strategic and many lessons-learned were accumulated during the campaign.  For example, asparagus doesn't need 8 minutes in the steamer unless you're actually shooting for something that looks like emerald paste at the end.  Similarly 400°F might be the right temp to quick fire a plain ole roast, but it was a wee too hot for a glazed one - lower the temp and extend the time.  The root veggies had been peeled and diced the evening before and had sat the night zip-locked in the fridge drenched in olive oil, all of which should have been drained off prior to trying to roast them.  But all in all the faux pas were cosmetic and things turned out well.

I wasn't expecting great things from the kids with regard to the lamb - N made a point of mentioning how badly it smelled cooking at least three times (and he had a point) - but when it came time to plate it all up, there was a rather dramatic change of heart.  I had timed it to be medium, but the roast was chubby in the center and tapered at the end, so there was actually a fairly nice variety of levels of "doneness" to choose from.  The kids, to Stacy's quivering horror, demanded only the bright red pieces that quivered as she did.  I thought the first morsel would cure them of that (while Stacy thought it more likely to poison them), but the young tykes showed themselves to be true carnivores and chomped it down cool and red.  They both had second helpings; N actually went back to the well four times.  (Mary may have had a little lamb, but N's portion was substantial.) Even Stacy seemed pleased with her much more grayish selection.

But everyone agreed the evening standout was the strawberry pie.  I'm not normally a strawberry pie person. I've been abused too much at the hands of Marie Calendars and her towering monstrosities of cardboard berries and red rubber glaze.  But this was different.  Stacy had gone to the farmers market earlier in the week to get some berries and had been thoroughly disappointed with the early season offerings.  She was about to abandon the idea when she saw a stand off by itself selling a varietal called "Gaviota" strawberries.  They were very pricey, about double what the other berries ran, so she didn't really consider them until the vendor thrust a sample at her.  Her later description of the experience made me think of 70's flower children and their stories about first trying acid. She plunked down more jingle than I'd like to think about and came away with a future strawberry pie par excellence.  This brings me to a final lesson learned for the Easter dry run:  A single Gaviota strawberry pie will simply not cut it for a party of fourteen.