Our Easter

We had a quiet Easter at home, opting to forego our usual hike at Dodge Point and rest up from our vacation.  We did, though, need to dye some eggs.  Once again, I tried the natural vegetable dye route, and once again, it failed (if only I had read my own blog post from last year's Easter!)

Naturally-dyed eggs not all that different from just plain eggs.

All I succeeded in was making the house smell like a Soviet-era tenement from all the boiled cabbage.  And Z (who apparently has total Easter recall) insisted that he wanted to do the eggs "like last year." So I actually ran out while dinner was cooking on Saturday night and joined all the other idiots last minute shopping for Easter and picked up a Paas kit and a jug of vinegar.  (I had actually gone shopping earlier in the day, and I actually had "food coloring" on my list, but I picked up a purple cabbage instead).

Kids actually enjoying dyeing eggs, rather than waiting for them to boil.

And how much more fun was that?  100%.  Sometimes I can be such a blockhead.  And how much prettier are the fake-dyed eggs?  100%.

We had them for breakfast, along with hot cross buns and, of course, candy.

I try to keep the candy fairly minimal, and I've managed to trick my kids into thinking yogurt-covered malted milk balls (they think it's white chocolate) and fruit-juice-sweetened yogurt-covered raisins are treats.  They weren't too thrilled by the Bunny Grahams, though (of course if I bought them any other time of year they'd think they were in heaven).  And I had picked up some natural-flavored and colored jelly beans at Trader Joe's earlier in the month, and they were sooo good.

The Easter bunny brought the boys these little critters (pattern here)

And these tiny gnomes from the same shop (which, I'm embarrassed to admit, I bought pretty much right after Christmas, because they were so cute!)

C and the boys had the idea of doing an Earth Day/Easter trash cleanup along the road, so we spent the afternoon doing that.  I have to admit, I hate picking up trash--I resent cleaning up after other people (hmm...maybe I should have thought about that before having three kids...).  In about 1/4 mile, we filled up three big garbage bags (and left the two tires and the gas tank behind...the deer skeleton we left to pick up another day).  When we got back to our driveway, C gave the boys a little lesson, "See how much trash we picked up, on such a short stretch of road.  Now imagine how much trash there is all along this whole road and along all of the other roads.  People are disgusting."  There's an Easter lesson for you.  Oh, and also that tons of people apparently drive along our road drinking beer and throwing the empties out their windows...makes me feel great about letting my kids ride their bikes along it.

After a long hot shower to clean away all that filth, I made Easter dinner.  For some reason, I like having Greek food on Easter.  Often I make spanikopita, but this year I made Spiros Polemi's Grandmother's Plasto--it's kind of a pie, with a polenta crust filled with tons of feta cheese and greens--from the A-1 Diner cookbook (if you ever find yourself inexplicably in central Maine, that is the restaurant you should go to--really well-done diner classics, plus a whole specials board of gourmet yumminess), served with roasted potatoes, rosemary bread and mixed olives. 

 For dessert I made lemon pudding cake (also from the A-1 cookbook), hoping C wouldn't notice the puddingy part of it (he has an aversion to creamy desserts), but he did...which means I'm going to have to eat all of the rest of it myself.  After that, I'm giving up sugar.