Thursday, April 21, 2011

Easter Menu

Ok, so this is my first time ever heading up an Easter celebration, and I'm just praying everything turns out ok. There's going to somewhere around a dozen people total -mostly young folks like us who can't celebrate Easter with their families. Young folk - Allen turned 30 this year. I guess young is truly relative. Anyway, fortunately our church is deeply rooting in the "tell me what I can bring" tradition, so I don't have to do quite all of it myself. We all live in relatively small places and are used to loaning each other chairs and folding tables and such and therefore enabling each other to host rather more people than our normally modest abodes allow. Allen and I live in "large" apartment, and even we find it a stretch to fit a dozen people in here. But enough about California housing!

Easter Menu:

Appetizers:

Cheese Plate
Devilled Eggs
Veg and Dip

Main course:

Roast Ham (recipe from Perfect Recipes for Having People Over)
Tamari Marinated Chicken Breasts (MIL recipe)
Mashed Potatoes
Oven Roasted Harvicot Vertes
Rolls
Salad
Wine/Italian Soda

Dessert:

Trifle
Undecided
Limoncello
Coffee/Tea



I've tried to pick items I could prep in the days previous or that would cook quickly with minimal attention. The roast can cook while we're at church. Things like trifle, devilled eggs, and rolls I can make ahead of time. Most everything else will either cook quickly or be brought by my delightful friends.

The big deal right now is just getting things cleaned up. We're in the midst of an organizational shift, which means that I've accumulated clutter from the "oh that will go somewhere else later" pre-organization that's been going on lately. It might be about time to make a pot of strong black tea and just blast through some of that. Of course that likely means my back bedroom (otherwise known as that room full of stuff) will become even more impossible (and impassible), but at least I'll have my new sideboard cleared away. Yes, I have a new sideboard (ok, it's from Ikea), and my dining area is so much nicer now. The table actually fits where it's supposed to instead of being awkwardly thrust out in the middle of the room because I had no place for dishes but the baker's rack and no place for the baker's rack than that much needed corner of the dining area.

I hope I really can get through that clutter quickly because until I get that done I really can't decorate, and that's one of my favorite parts of celebrations :) I don't know that I'm all that good at it, but I love setting out candles and turning on my Christmas lights (which are year round contributors to my bookcase). Oh, and I found the most amazing idea for an Easter egg hunt. One of the suggestions I found was to hide puzzle pieces in the eggs. I thought that might be a fun element to get people mixing together and moving around a little.

So there are my Easter plans. I'll try to post pictures once some of this comes together, but for now I need to clean out my closets so I have a place to put all the stuff accumulating on various surfaces.

1 comment: