Land of the giants.

Hello there. I should be ironing, or finishing the laundry I started, or doing my exercise video, but instead I'm blogging. Go figure (more evidence of me having the shortest attention span of anyone I know, and also the time management skills of a... well, of someone who can't manage her time for beans). I thought I'd blog about Easter, though, since I have such great footage to share.

Doug and I went to Easter at my sister and brother-in-law's house down in Norwich, CT, so it was a Connecticut Easter. Easter is a no-pressure holiday (at least for me, since all I do for it is cook some desserts); it's like a vacation day in the middle of the week. There's no build-up and you can just relax and go with the flow. And I love the food at Easter - it's one of my favorite holidays for food. Antipasto salads, fruit salad, regular salad, ham, lamb, potatoes, green veggies, applesauce, pasta, breads, and then the desserts! Definitely a feast. And this year was no exception. My sister and Mike had 36 (yes, 36) people at their house on Sunday and we all sat down to a 4-course (or was it 5?) meal. Mike and Laura do most of the cooking, with the rest of us bringing a dessert or a side dish. I feel only slightly badly that all the cooking falls onto my sister and brother-in-law's shoulders - they really do an outstanding job with the food. Mike is the kind of cook who will mince his own garlic cloves and the little pieces of garlic will be perfectly uniform in size. He has such patience in the kitchen. He's amazing.

Being that there were 36 people at this dinner, everything was giant-sized. We had a giant ham a giant salad and all sat around a giant table . Me, I tried to start a giant-sized wine habit (move over coffee, wine may just take your place as my vice of choice!) but I realized too late that the screw-top has to be off the cheap bottle of wine that I bought in order for the wine to have any effect on me at all. I did have fun seeing the family again; some people, like Amy and Mike, I haven't seen since last fall. Here's a photo of me, my sister, and Amy, sharing a smile. Awww, it's like a Hallmark card. Here's another Hallmark-type photo - my sister and Mike cooking amidst a sea of smoke. I was soooo glad that Mike kept setting off the smoke detector while cooking the ham. The sugary glaze probably was running off the body of that giant piece of meat onto the oven bottom, burning it and causing a giant smoke attack. We opened all the windows, fanned the house out, etc., but the smoke kept coming. The meal was still delicious, of course, but I was so pleased that someone like Mike made his smoke detector go off while cooking. That means that the next time mine goes off I will tell Doug that the high-pitched screeching of the alarm is really a compliment, the highest praise a cook can get. Finally, look at these fine desserts! Note that in the key lime tart there's a mark where my finger had been. There's a story behind this tart (as there is with all of my attempts at baking), but to keep this blog relatively short I'll just say that I needed to stick my finger in the tart to see if I had totally ruined it. It tasted fine, so I brought it to Easter anyway. I think Doug and I ate most of it by ourselves. I slaved over that thing. Squeezed eight slippery little limes by hand, swearing never, ever, to squeeze my own lime juice again. The tart was good, though. It really was.

I suppose in the spirit of Easter I should also post this photo of the treat Doug and I found in our driveway on Friday evening. Isn't there some kind of biblical story around Easter-time relating to fish? How when Moses parted the Red Sea one lowly fish popped out and Jesus turned it into a feast of fishes in order to feed people facing famine? Anyway, as we drove into the driveway on Friday night I see this strange shape. We park the car and get out to inspect it. It takes us a while, but eventually we figure out what it is: Now how in the world did this thing get here? First of all, we don't eat fish, at least not whole fish. And second of all, even if we did we wouldn't toss the body out onto the driveway to decompose like this. So this little dried-up feast of fins must have been some kind of present from the many critters who run around our yard. Like the squirrels or the birds. We didn't move the body; left it there for the kind soul who dropped it off in case it might want to take it back. And sure enough, by Sunday night the carcass was gone. Poof! I swear, it was an Easter miracle. Maybe each year the fish body will come back and we can charge admission for this most holy of events. If it gets me out of Pain Capital that much faster, then it's a done deal!