Hi friends!
I hope you all had a lovely Easter followed by a good week. And if your week wasn't a good one, I hope this week is off to a better start.
Our Easter didn't go as planned. (Does anything, anymore, go as planned?) My daughter was very sick on Easter. So about 6 AM we made the call to postpone our Easter celebration with our son and daughter-in-law until the next Sunday (Orthodox Easter, yesterday). I'm glad we pushed the date back a week and am grateful the whole family could be on board.
Meal prep for Easter did become slightly more complicated, however. Before we canceled our Easter Day plans, I had baked a ham, roasted a turkey, baked a lemon meringue pie, and made an onion and crumb topping for green bean casserole. I had also bought fresh asparagus and fresh strawberries to add to our Easter meal. (I had other side dishes planned for the meal, but hadn't begun to assemble any of them.)
But I had the meats, a whole pie, fresh produce, and crumb topping that had to be dealt with posthaste. So the day after actual Easter, I sliced the ham and turkey and froze it. I made a stock with the turkey neck and carcass, freezing the resulting stock in smaller containers for making gravy later. I roasted the ham bone and made ham stock, which I froze for soups later. I froze the onion and crumb topping to use in a week. The asparagus wouldn't keep for another week fresh, so I blanched it all and froze it to use on our delayed-Easter. That left the strawberries and pie to contend with. Strawberries wouldn't keep and I didn't want to freeze them, so we ate them over the next couple of days. I wasn't sure about freezing the pie, so we decided to just eat it during the week, and I'd bake a second pie for our delayed celebration. I was able to thaw, reheat, use to finish recipes or serve, as is, all of the frozen items. And for the most part, quality didn't suffer too much with the freezing (exception being the asparagus -- it would have had better texture if cooked fresh).
The late Easter meal all worked out okay. I bought another container of fresh strawberries and made a second pie. With the extra week, I even found time to make a refrigerator dough to make dinner rolls. This is what our complete Easter meal menu looked like:
- ham
- turkey with gravy
- mashed potatoes
- green bean casserole
- honey-mustard carrots
- asparagus with lemon butter
- fresh strawberries
- crescent rolls
- date and coconut rolls (a fruit candy)
- lemon meringue pie
- Jordan almonds
- mint, lemon balm, rose petal herb tea
- sparkling water
Everyone enjoyed the meal. It was colorful, varied in flavor and texture, and filling. We ate this as a combined lunch and dinner, so that too-stuffed feeling had plenty of time to diminish before bedtime.
There were enough leftovers of everything to send some home with my son and daughter-in-law and for our dinner on Monday (tonight). I have some roll dough, turkey stock, and both meats left in the fridge for making a simple dinner on Tuesday of turkey/ham soup and rolls. Plus there are several containers of ham and turkey meat and stock frozen for future meals.
The downside to this delayed celebration include: my daughter was very sick and felt miserable for a few days; the asparagus wasn't as crisp and fresh if it had been cooked on the day of the meal; I had to spend extra money to buy more strawberries; I had to bake a second pie; we all had to wait a week to gather together.
The upside to the delayed celebration included: we got to eat a second container of strawberries; we got to eat a second pie; I added dinner rolls to the menu; everyone was well by the time we all got together; I had extra time to put together the side dishes, as the meats were baked/roasted already at this point.
All in all, a lovely Easter celebration, even if late, spending time with my whole family.
