Easter Parade

Easter means a lot of different things to people.

For some, it is the most spiritual time of year.
For others, it's one of few times they head to church.

For kids, there are myriad egg hunts.
For foodies, a hunt for a great brunch.

For big families, it's a time of rambunctious get-togethers.
For those who are alone, Easter can be a quiet time of reflection.

For little girls, it can mean a pretty new outfit to wear.
For traditionalists, it's Easter lilies in memory of lost loved ones.

For gardeners, it's spring; everything is fresh and life is new.
For fashionistas, the white shoes come out.

For retailers, another cha-ching in the candy aisle.
For the health-conscious, a minefield of artificial colors.

And so it is. Everyone celebrates (or doesn't) in his own way.

Growing up, Easter Sunday meant a trip to church, posing for pictures, and the backyard egg hunt. Sometimes there was also a hunt at our grandparents' country club (which I remember included plenty of those cellophane-wrapped pastel-colored candy eggs with white centers...thinking of them now makes my teeth hurt). I was probably at least 12 before I realized that the reason we kids stayed behind at church with Granny and Grandpa (while Mom and Dad raced home) was really so the Easter bunny had time to hide eggs, and not as much because our grandparents wanted to show us off to their friends.

I still have the 8mm films from many of our egg hunts, even more fun to watch when we ran them backwards and put all the eggs back in their places. I'm pretty sure we hunted hard-boiled eggs. I'm also thinking my mom was the only person who ate those -- Dad was allergic and as a consequence the rest of us believed these eggs were nearly poisonous. As part of the hunt, we always found a special basket just for each of us, and that's where the chocolate bunny and other goodies were stashed.

As a grown-up, I took over the Easter meal after inheriting Granny's dishes and a little box crammed with index cards on which were her hand-written recipes. While I don't always get out her good china, one thing I always make is a strawberry ice cream dessert that we had at her house. It's pink, sweet, and surprisingly easy to make. And since I've got the ring mold she always used -- and the flat spatula she always used to get the ice cream out of the ring mold -- I've got no excuse not to.

One day, I intend to experiment with the formula to figure out how to use fresh fruit, maybe add some blueberries, and possibly even freeze it in my little hand-cranked ice cream maker (I think it would have a different consistency that would be easier to eat).

Strawberry Ice Cream Dessert

• 10-oz frozen strawberries in syrup (I haven't been able to find 10-oz packages so I just use a whole 16-oz package these days)
• 1 pint sour cream (use the real thing)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla

Thaw the strawberries and break them up with a fork (Granny's instructions say to use an old-fashioned egg beater...but I don't have one!). You don't want whole berries since they get very hard when frozen. Stir in the sour cream, sugar and vanilla. Pour into ring mold (of course you can use any type of mold or dish you like!). Freeze.

In 2007, on Granny's china with homemade cookies.

Loosen ring by running a little warm water over the back side of it. Run a flat spatula around the edges and unmold onto a plate. Cut into slices and serve, garnished with fresh berries and mint leaves. We serve small slices with shortbread, sugar cookies, pound cake or cupcakes!

With coconut cupcakes in 2010.
My Dessert Boy loves it.

We'll have an egg hunt (plastic eggs instead of real ones -- I tried hiding real eggs one year and they boys refused to pick them up..."nothing good inside"). If it rains, either the kids and eggs get wet, or we do it in the house. I'm leaning toward getting wet. Easy for me to say...I'm not hunting. :)

Happy Easter!

2004 -- first Easter. Bunny feet!

 

2006 -- you did not see me eat this!

2013 -- big kids...and a lot of dandelions!

2009 -- bucketheads





Make the Best of It...

My Granny had a saying. Whenever things weren't going well, I remember her telling us we'd have to "make the best of it." She was always cheerful about it (although I don't know what she might have been thinking behind that optimistic exterior) and I figured it probably had something to do with having lived through the depression...a long-ago, faraway occasion that as a child I couldn't possibly comprehend.

Three weeks ago I had cause to adopt my grandmother's attitude when, after a difficult evening of burned-out light bulbs and broken Spinbrushes, I dumped a large load of wet clothes into the dryer and attempted to start it. I pushed start like I always do, and the dryer just stared at me after beeping and clicking a bit. No amount of coaxing could get it to tumble, not even a little. It had just successfully dried a load of jeans about 8 hours before. Ugh! I wanted to go to bed early and cry. I hung the wet clothes all over the tiny laundry room, and checked Sears' repair schedule. Conveniently, they could take a look in a week (which usually doesn't guarantee it would be fixed that day). I checked my calendar and knew it would be at least two weeks before I could spend a leisurely day waiting around the house for a repairman.

Desperate, I made the best of it and turned to facebook, hoping someone could recommend a super repair person they had found. What I got was a bunch of guys encouraging me to visit You Tube for repair instructions. So naturally I googled the problem and took apart the machine. Right...it sounds so easy until you're lying on the floor in a puddle of lint. Sadly, it wasn't the two most common problems (a fuse or a belt). But the good news is, I've got a much cleaner lint trap (which yielded 13 cents and a number of stray collar stays). Have you ever seen the interior of your lint trap? It's a little bit scary!

Deep breath. Make the best of it.

Knowing I had to do something about the growing mounds of dirty clothes (we had just returned from a spring break trip, and the family was still rudely changing their clothes daily), and knowing I didn't want to spend even 10 minutes in a Laundromat, I put on my errand hat and traveled to Home Depot for sturdy clothesline (and a few lightbulbs) and then to Target for a bunch of clothespins. Armed with that can-do attitude, I strung that clothesline all around the back porch and out into a tree. Knowing the washing machine still worked, I set about washing clothes and within an hour I had the back porch decorated with a load of men's and boy's underwear. This felt pretty good until I went to bring them in...and found that while they were dry, they were also a bit...how shall I say?...crunchy.

Making the best of it, I had an epiphany: So that's why people use liquid fabric softener.

Which explains why the second load (my underwear) came out softer. You see, I realized pretty quickly that hanging the little dryer sheets on the line wasn't going to help soften anything. So my friend google helped me find a recipe for homemade fabric softener. Did you know you can take all those little bottles of hotel hair conditioner, mix them with white vinegar, and make a perfectly good fabric softener? That's what you do when you're too lazy to go to the store, or when you're making the best of something.

Now that I'm in my 4th week of drying clothes outside, I've learned a few more things -- especially that laundry without a dryer is very weather-dependent.

• There are some days you just can't do the wash. This is both good (day off!) and bad (no way you'll have those jeans for tomorrow).
• It's important to watch not only the precipitation but also the humidity. I've had loads dry in 20 minutes when the wind is blowing and the humidity is zero. But on a humid day, trying to dry clothes is about as smart as fixing my hair.
• And the wind -- it can be such a help -- but you'd better have things clipped onto the line tightly, or that underwear will be flying across the yard!
• There's nothing that will get you to jump out of bed faster than leaving your laundry out overnight to finish drying...and then hearing a huge clap of thunder at 2am.
• On a nice day, hanging the wet stuff on the line is a great reason to spend some alone time outside (people scatter when I say it's time to put out the laundry). And later you get to go back out for more quiet time, to retrieve the dry clothes!
• When you grill with clothes on the line, sometimes you wear a smoky essence.

Turns out, most things dry just as well on the line as they do in the dryer, which I didn't expect. Cotton towels aren't as soft. Some shirts come out unwearable. But that's minor stuff. I've got an appointment for the repairman later this week. We'll see how bad the damage is. But at least we have a workaround -- and temps in the 80's in the forecast. Overall, this is WAY better than when the dishwasher was out for a month. Don't get me started on that!

In other appliance news, the front-loading washer (for which I've been very grateful since the dryer went on vacation) isn't perfect. When I innocently opened the door last week to run a load of clothes, it was like Niagara Falls in the laundry room. I am not kidding when I say water poured/gushed/cascaded out the front of the machine (the seal works great, incidentally, if you keep the door closed) and splashed onto the linoleum, obviously enjoying its sudden freedom. Fortunately, a basket of recently-line-dried towels was nearby and I could mop up pretty quickly. Making the best of it, I can say the floor in there is a bit cleaner now.

I can only imagine how amused my Granny might be if she could see how this appliance failure has affected me. After all, she used her dishwasher for storing pantry items (I can remember going there for dinner and having to hand-wash dishes because the dishwasher was filled with crackers and boxes of Chex). She had a dryer but rarely used it; her square pink bathtub always had clothes dripping into it. All I can figure is, growing up during the depression must make these bulky appliances seem pretty silly.