Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Last minute Easter dinner

I knew when I started seriously considering a kitchen renovation that I'd have some time with an inaccessible kitchen. I wasn't particularly worried. We have restaurants. Restaurants have coupons. It will only be a few days.

I talked to a kitchen planner on Friday, and he pointed out something that I hadn't considered...to make a Corian counter, you need to have the cabinets in place for the template, then you need to wait for the actual fabrication. So my time without counter, and sink, and dishwasher, will be more accurately measured in weeks, not days.

As it happens, my mom is re-doing her kitchen right now, though on a smaller scale and doing much more of the work herself. She mentioned to me Friday night that because she's packed up all her cooking stuff, she wasn't making Easter dinner.

Last week I was still in the recovery stage of that stomach flu, and I was following the doctor-recommended "low residue" diet. "Low residue" means "nothing I normally eat." Instead of whole grains, I was allowed white bread, pasta, and rice. Instead of fresh vegetables and salad I could eat soft canned vegetables and fruit cocktail. Thursday I looked at my plate...meatballs in gravy over egg noodles with canned peas and canned carrots...and said "Dinner, circa 1955." I was dying for real food.

Saturday night I declared myself healed and decided I could make Easter dinner, so I invited my parents and then went shopping. I had not thought this through. Easter is...whatever the grocery stores have displayed in abundance. I grabbed a ham, and recalled Victor's grandmother telling me years ago that the easiest way to cook a ham is to put it in a Crock Pot and pour a Pepsi over it. I added asparagus and carrots (fresh!) and cauliflower with cheese sauce (frozen, because I could only steam two vegetables at a time anyway.)

I love to dye eggs. When we were kids, we used to dye three or four dozen, then we'd dye napkins and whatever else we could get our hands on before mom threw the dye away. We made our dye with food coloring, not those crappy little dried pellets, and one of the color suggestions on the box of food coloring was "toast." I loved that color, although really it just looked like brown eggs. That in mind, and because I was getting a late start, I got some brown eggs and hard boiled them. A few cracked, so I made them them into deviled eggs.

My dad's still supposed to watch his sugar intake (pre-diabetic), so I got a box of Splenda brownie mix and made it with a can of black beans. (It sounds revolting, but it makes remarkably good brownies. Puree the beans in a blender, blend in the mix, pur it in a pan, and bake.)

My mom brought That Fruit Salad with Those Little Marshmallows and pinot noir. We also had a box of Peeps that somehow never got opened. Dinner, last-minute though it was, was a complete success, and I was able to get my parents to invite us over for dinner with them when I lose my kitchen sink.

Posted by Nic at March 28, 2005 05:44 PM