What do you eat at Easter? (updated)

The local supermarket ads always feature any ethnic feast or holiday that's going on. When it's not your own tradition, the reasons for the specific foods they're featuring are quite mysterious. Why does this or that Indian festival require this or that vegetable, or that dessert? What are they going to make with those big sacks of rice and flour that are on sale?

So with that in mind, I find the Easter-week ads amusing. What do non-Easter-celebrating people make of the fact that cream cheese is almost always featured, along with eggs? I'm not even sure what we're meant to do with that: cream cheese icing for carrot cake? Cheese cake? Cheese balls?

There are frozen vegetables, fruit pies, vanilla ice cream, cases of pop, cake mix, Pillsbury rolls on sale. Stuffing mix and spices. Clamato juice (I don't think I have ever had that, not even once). Ham, lamb, and turkeys. Pots of spring flowers. Bacon, I suppose to eat with the eggs or pancakes at your Easter Brunch.

Well, anyway, here's our extended-family menu for Sunday dinner this year.

Turkey if we can find one, or ham if we can't
Sweet potato salad from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home
Carol Flinders' Tofu-Almond Lasagna
Salad that my sister-in-law is bringing
Raw veggie plate
Kiffle (jam-filled Easter rolls, but we're using this roll dough this year)

Fruit pizza (white vegan cake baked in a pizza pan, with strawberry jam sauce and fresh fruit on top)
Maybe another dessert from my sister-in-law
Maybe some other fresh fruit or candies if we have some.

Something to drink.

Besides the family dinner, we have a "Paska Party" at church before the service on Easter morning, which means, mostly, coffee and sweet breads, or whatever people want to bring. I am probably going to take cream cheese mints (the gf people at church like them, and I had already bought some of that mysterious cream cheese on sale) and some of our kiffle. For Friday we don't usually buy hot cross buns since nobody except me likes those weird bits of peel and stuff in them, but I did make Carrot Spice Cupcakes (updated link 2023) (more like muffins) for a treat.

(The Apprentice wanted to know why the texture of the muffins was lighter than most of our muffins. It's sort of a hybrid recipe, halfway between cake and muffin batter, with two eggs. Also, I used one cup whole wheat flour and the rest ground-up rolled oats. I have made them with just ground-up oats, too. The recipe calls for coconut, nuts, and raisins in addition to carrots, but I left those out; and I changed the spices a bit, left out the ginger but added a bit of cloves and allspice.)

Raspberrry Cheesecake Tarts, for the Apprentice

This week our Apprentice turns two decades old.

She had to work all weekend, but made it home just in time for Sunday dinner.  In her honour, we had turkey and mashed potatoes.  Dessert, instead of a regular birthday cake, was watermelon and mini cheesecakes, the ones Momma's Corner showed us how to make.  I made them with regular-sized muffin papers rather than mini ones, and used half Momma's filling (one package of cream cheese); that made sixteen small cheesecakes, two apiece and a few over in case of accidents.

Instead of jam on top, I made a thick sauce from frozen raspberries, and spooned that on top after the cakes had cooled a bit.  Raspberry-rhubarb might have been nice too.

Happy Birthday, Apprentice!  (And enjoy your day off.)

What's for supper? Back to our veggie roots

When we were first married, we had more vegetarian meals than meat ones; especially quick things we could make after work. Green Spaghetti and Chickpea Patties were two of our standbys. We found the Chickpea Patties recipe in a 1991 Vegetarian Times article; there's a recipe for Green Spaghetti in the same article, but we make ours differently--more cheese.

So that's what we had tonight:

Green Pasta (we used fusilli)
Chickpea Patties
Carrot sticks.

Green Pasta

I measured out the ingredients tonight as I went, so that I could write it down; but the amounts are really variable. I happened to have a whole block of cream cheese (bought on sale), but it's not necessary to use quite that much. We had enough leftovers to fill a casserole dish.

1 8-oz. block cream cheese
1/3 cup cottage cheese
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
5 oz. mozzarella, cut up
1 tbsp. margarine (probably not necessary with all that cream cheese)
1/4 tsp. or more black pepper (or grind some on at the table)
bit of garlic powder
leftover cooked broccoli (entirely optional)
1 6-oz. package fresh spinach (but frozen would work too)
Approximately 1 lb. hot pasta

What you want to do is have hot drained pasta, hot just-cooked spinach, and the blended mixture of cheeses all ready to mix at the same time. You don't have to cook the finished mixture; the heat of the pasta and spinach warms up the sauce ingredients.

I started the pasta cooking, had the spinach rinsed, and then put everything else into the food processor and got it pretty much blended. When the pasta was done, I let it drain in a colander and cooked the spinach in the same pot for a few minutes, steaming in its own rinse water. When it was wilted, I ran it through the food processor with the rest of the sauce mixture. Then, in a BIG bowl (or you could use the pasta/spinach pot again), I mixed everything together. If you think you might have cooked too much pasta, mix it into the sauce mixture gradually until you have the proportions you want. Serve as soon as possible.

Linked from 4 Moms Share Vegetarian Recipes.