Upcoming Easter Menu, Mark I - with recipes

This year, "regular" Easter and Ukrainian Easter are the farthest apart they can be--five weeks. So Ukrainian Easter won't be until May this year! I'm saving the more traditional Ukrainian items like bitter beets for Ukrainian Easter.  Except for the mushrooms. Can't hold those back!

I got a lovely pork picnic shoulder for the ham this year, going to bake it in the slow cooker, then glaze it in it the oven.  Your typical brown sugar, Dijon mustard glaze. And I'm going to do that cross-hatching the fat and studding it with cloves thing, too. Yum! (An example is here, using maple syrup too! http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/classic-baked-ham-with-maple-mustard-glaze-10000001598619/)

Potato and mushroom bake is a fantastic side for a baked ham, a delightful combination of flavours that's really different from regular scalloped potatoes.  My only change is that I only use 1% milk, I find if I use cream it makes it too rich to eat as much as I want. :)  I also use Swiss Cheese instead of Gruyère.  http://www.muminawe.com/recipes/potato-and-mushroom-bake.html

My pidpenky will be prepared as I always do, according to my recipe on my learnpysanky website.   I'll be using mostly Portobello mushrooms this year, because I want this dish to be a little more robust this year. http://www.learnpysanky.com/recipes/pidpenky.html

And I'm going to try this delicious-sounding recipe for Bourbon mashed sweet potatoes I haven't tried before.  I might end up simmering the bourbon a bit longer than stated, as I do find sometimes when cooking with whiskey that the alcohol doesn't burn off enough and the dish ends up a bit harsh.  http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/bourbon_mashed_sweet_potatoes/

Uncle Steve's pickled eggs (see my recipe: http://www.learnpysanky.com/recipes/pickled-eggs.html) and my Habitant mixed pickles (http://mtpearl.colemans.ca/habitant-sweet-mustard-pickles-750-ml/)will round out the meal.

Dave's family recipe for pineapple whipped cream squares will be our dessert.  I buy canned whipped cream now, because I found it hard to use a whole container of it before it separates.  I know, talk about your first-world problems...

Super Simple Pineapple Whipped Cream Squares

Make a graham cracker crumb crust (you can buy the crumbs in most supermarkets, or buy the crackers and squish them up yourself).  About 1 1/4 cups of crumbs to 1/4 cup melted margarine or butter. Press into 9" pie plate or equivalent square bottom dish.

Drain a can of pineapple chunks or bits well.  Mix about 2:1 or 1:1 ratio of pineapple with whipped cream (enough to make the pineapple stick together nicely).  Spoon onto graham cracker crust.

That's it!  SOOOOO good, too. :)

Have a great Easter, everyone!

Happy Easter (dinner)!

Hope everyone has a wonderful, peaceful Easter weekend. I'm working, of course. :) Hotels never close! But I still made a nice meal for us to enjoy, albeit separately.

I tried this recipe for ham, but left out the sauce (I just used a little toupie ham, so the drippings weren't really existent). So basically, it was a steaming, then glazing with Dijon and brown sugar, followed by a packing on of toasted bread crumbs baked on high heat for a few minutes. It looks DIVINE...

For sides, I went with mustard mixed pickles (a jar of Habitant in the fridge is a great memory of childhood, it always goes great with pork and ham dishes), my fave pidpenky (my own recipe, an amalgam of ones I found online) with garlic, wine and beef consomme, candied carrots (with a little butter and brown sugar, although this sounds really good...), possibly vinegared beets (I'll share the recipe if I end up making it - its a symbolic dish for Ukrainians, with the red symbolizing the blood of Christ, and the vinegar and usually horseradish symbolizing the bitterness of the death Jesus faced), and for a starch we'll have Potato bread stuffing - I'll use this recipe as a base - instead of poultry seasoning, I'll likely use a lot of sage and a little summer savory, little minced onion, etc (check out more details on how I've made my dressing in the past). No paska this year though, no time! (Here's the recipe my family's used for decades). And no koubassa either :( you have to hunt in this city for decent stuff, we don't have a large Eastern European community like Montreal or Toronto. Although we are getting more ethnic cuisine from other cultures, slowly over time, which is great!

Just a side note: I love SOAR (which is where the stuffing base recipe came from) - for SO many years in the early days of the Internet, that was THE place for online recipes. They don't show up high in the search engines these days, but there are a TON of great recipes there (and not a lot of repeats of the same ones over and over that you find on ALL the sites, this site was before those days!), be sure to take some time to look around! The ethnic foods section was especially amazing, you just didn't have access to these recipes unless you were brought up with them - it was really inspiring!

So, that'll be Easter supper here in Halifax - hope you have a great Easter supper celebration wherever you are! Christos Voskrese!

Pysanky Final

And here's the finished product! There are some things I'd change about it, like varying the line widths a bit more - but considering I was able to dig out only two sizes of kistky to use, I think it turned out pretty okay! Happy Easter Everyone!

Finally, Pysanky!

The sad thing is, I don't have as much time as I'd like to devote to pysanky these days - this is the first one I made all Lent! Spent a couple hours doing the white tonight, hope to finish it before Easter! :)



As per usual with the ones I make at the end of Lent, I didn't follow a set design, I prefer to make it up as I go along. Hopefully, it'll turn out pretty!

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! I'm off to plan out my big meal for tomorrow: marmalade glazed ham, kielbasa (what we call koubasa), borscht, maple-glazed carrots, pidpenky, a delicious hash-brown casserole, pickled eggs, and wine-pickled beets! Should be delish! I've made some things ahead to make tomorrow easier. Looking forward to all that good food.

Here's a pick of some of my pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs) from a few years back, on a background of one of my embroidered cloths (the cloth isn't quite finished yet, I really need to get it done so I can use it in my Easter basket next year). :)



Don't forget, if you want to learn how to make these eggs yourself, check out my LearnPysanky site!

got eggs?

With only a week to go before the big feast at Easter, it's time already to make pickled eggs! Man, time goes by so fast!

I've enjoyed my uncle's recipe for these eggs for several years now (although I don't add the pickling spice, I prefer the flavour without) - they're a great addition to my Easter table!

And I HAVE to make time this week to try my hand at paska again! Last years' first attempt at making this special Ukrainian Easter bread went pretty darn well, but the decoration left much to be desired... :) Hopefully, it'll turn out prettier this time! ;)

Shout it from the rooftops!! A new type of perogy!

I just created a new form of perogy (well, it's new to me, and I haven't heard of anyone doing this before). I added God's Perfect Food, bacon, to the regular perogy filling of potato and cheddar cheese. It is AWESOME!! I mean c'mon, why didn't I think of this before??? Sour cream, potato and cheddar cheese. What normally goes with this trio? Bacon! So I added some fried bacon (drained on paper towels and cooled) to the insides and have a WONDERFUL new addition to this year's Easter Feaster (it's really just a feast, but it rhymes this way, so what the heck).

More on the Easter food prep later, I have to go add this little tidbit of "culinary history" to my recipe on LearnPysanky.com! :D

It's REALLY yummy! :)

Re: Bacon being God's Perfect Food: I don't know if it is, but it is to me. I couldn't live in a world without pork. :) Heh heh heh

Here's my perogy recipe, which I'm off to update, in case you want to try it:
http://www.learnpysanky.com/recipes/pirohy.html

It is not I, but the Willow, that strikes you

It's Palm Sunday for most Christians, but for Ukrainians and other Slavic Christians, it is Flowery or Willow Sunday. We use pussy willows instead of palms, for a variety of reasons. (Of course, technically because we use a different calendar, Willow Sunday isn't until next Sunday, but that's a whole other thing entirely). :) It is traditional to strike one another on the shoulder with the willow branch and say "It is not I but the willow branch which strikes you to remind you that in seven days is the Great Day". The willow was a well loved plant, heralding the coming of spring, and an immensely useful one too (did you know it has ASA in its branches?)

To get more info, check out this website that goes into some detail of the use of the Pussy Willow in Slavic religious and everyday tradition. And here it gives you some hints on how to propagate your own pussy willows. We've got a great bush on the side of the house, pictured here. As in ancient times, it is a wonderfully uplifting thing to see this sign that spring has come! :)

Easter, and Peeps

If you've never seen this before, you really must check out the Peep Research Site: http://www.peepresearch.org. A really fantastic site, take the time when you have a couple minutes for a good laugh at the wonderful "scientific" research these fine people have done regarding Peeps (those popular marshmallow bird-shaped treats only available at Easter time). Includes a dramatic demonstration of the Peep "fear response", and general reactions to cold, heat, water, and more! This site has been around a VERY LONG time, I'm glad to see it's still up and running!

(If you want to check out the official Peeps website, with info on its history, etc., it's here: http://www.marshmallowpeeps.com)