Brainstorming my Easter dinner menu plan

I guess it's about time I start thinking about Easter dinner. I've been busy and preoccupied the past several weeks. So I hadn't given the upcoming holiday dinner much thought. What I do know: there will be 6 of us; I'm cooking the meal; I'll make a cherry pie for dessert (lots of frozen cherries still); I have enough eggs to make a batch of deviled eggs; I have 1 bottle of sparkling apple cider leftover from Christmas dinner; and I think I'll do mustard-glazed carrots as one side dish. 

I can do a grocery shop on Friday. I have enough in the budget for this week to cover a few items for the dinner. I do have a whole chicken in the freezer and the garden rosemary looks good, plus I have lots of garlic. If I pick up a lemon at WinCo, I could make a lemon, garlic, and herb roasted chicken. It wouldn't be Easter without some asparagus. So I will also pick up a pound of asparagus at WinCo. It looks like I might have enough kale in the garden to make a sweet and tangy kale salad. If I don't have quite enough kale, I can stretch it with shredded red cabbage. For a starchy food I'll do refrigerator scratch rolls.

So I think this will be the menu:

• lemon and herb roasted chicken with gravy
• deviled eggs
• mustard-glazed carrots
• steamed asparagus
• kale and cranberry salad
• homemade dinner rolls
• cherry pie
• sparkling water, sparkling cider, tea, coffee
• extra -- if I get ambitious, I will also bake an open-faced plum pie with our surplus of frozen plums (I like to send a few slices of pie home with my son and daughter-in-law 😊)

I will need to buy:

• 1 lemon
• 1+ pound asparagus
• dried cranberries
• 1 bottle of sparkling water

I did get a start on the dessert this morning. I made a large batch of pie pastry dough for the freezer. My plan is to do one thing toward Easter dinner each day leading up to Saturday. Then on Saturday I can do a bunch of cooking and prep work to make Sunday a pleasant day for me, too.

What are your Easter plans? Will you be hosting and cooking? What will be on your menu? Can you think of any easy suggestions to add to my menu to punch it up?

Another Use-it-up Dish: Strata

The word strata means layers, usually referring to rock or soil layers. But it's also one of my favorite childhood dishes. Strata makes a warming supper dish or brunch entree. I make this so often that I forgot to mention it in last week's post on use-it-up cooking. But I made it again last week, twice in fact.

Early in the week I had leftover crusts from our tea sandwiches. So, Monday night I made a cheese, roast beef (from the roast beef and horseradish sandwiches), rye bread, beet greens, milk, and egg strata. It was delicious.

During the week, I was busy and didn't get to doing a big baking of bread, and we'd riun out of both potatoes and brown rice. For a couple of dinners I baked scratch drop biscuits to go with the entrees. The first batch were plain biscuits, which I served with gingered pear butter to go with our meal. I wanted to vary the next batch, so I made these more savory, adding onion powder, chopped green onions, shredded cheese, and bacon fat to the dough. Very tasty. But by the weekend I had a couple of each type remaining and knew I needed to use them soon.

So on Saturday we used the leftover biscuits in another strata. We also had some turkey bacon and leftover orange and green bells peppers to add to this strata. I coached my daughter through the process of making this one. She added a teaspoon of onion powder and some salt and black pepper to the egg and milk batter. While strata can be made in layers, I slice or cube the bread just as I would for bread pudding. I toss the dry with the wet ingredients together and dump into a buttered baking dish. I bake at 350 degrees F for about 40-45 minutes, until a knife inserted comes out clean. The baking time is dependent on the amount of milk added to the batter.

This was our supper on Saturday. My daughter made the strata for us, steamed some spinach, and sliced some strawberries. As we were washing up the dishes later, she commented that this was one of the easier dinners she'd made for us. Not only did this second strata use up stale biscuits, but it also used some long-in-the-tooth turkey bacon and the last remnants of two colorful bell peppers.

Leftover cooked meat, roasted or steamed vegetables, and some stale bread find a second life in strata. Yet, the cooked casserole looks as if it was all by design.

As a variation, I also make savory rice pudding (baked risotto), using leftover cooked rice, any cooked meat and/or veggies, grated cheese, all in a seasoned milk and egg batter, then baked as I would for a dessert baked rice pudding.

Do you make strata? What other ways do you use up stale bread products or crusts removed from sandwiches?