F2: Friday's Feast, Easter Menu Light

My good bloggy friend CaJoh has created a recurring feature post called Friday's Feast, dedicated to all things epicurean.  If you're interested in his vision for the feature, click here.  

This week seemed like a no-brainer.  It's Easter weekend.  Time to meditate core beliefs.  Time to celebrate hope and new life.  Time, also, to eat.  Time to eat a lot.  I guess one upside here is that, opposed to Christmas Season which runs a month complete, Easter feasting generally only lasts the weekend.  That's a little easier on the waistline.

The past few years, however, I have tried to lighten up our Easter dinner, mostly to lessen the guilt of eating my weight in jelly beans, m&ms, and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs.  I have given up some of the traditional foods that I grew up on and adore, but I have found the replacements to be quite elegant.

Traditional:      

• Ham
  
• Cheese Potatoes (funeral-style)  
  
• Artichokes
  
• Jello-Salad
  
• Rolls
  
• Several Desserts
  

New:

• Roasted Pork Loin
  
• Roasted Sweet Potatoes
  
• Asparagus
  
• Fresh Fruit Salad
  
• Orange Rolls (This one is worse.)
  
• Green Salad
  
• Carrot Cake bunnies
  

I got a recipe from Kelly a few years ago for a spiced maple marinade that gives the slightest sweet crust to the pork loin.  The sweet potatoes I peel, cube, and toss with a little olive oil and sprinkle lightly with cinnamon and allspice before roasting.  The asparagus is only better than the artichokes because of the dipping factor.  I saute´ them in a little olive oil and freshly pressed garlic.  Now the rolls.  Regular rolls are healthier than these orange rolls of my grandma's that are an unglazed cinnamon-style roll.  They are scrumptious, though, and remind me of my grandma.  So they stay.

The carrot cake I make is pretty good, if I do say so myself.  It is my mother's recipe, lightened up just a touch.  It gets rave reviews.  I use applesauce in place of the oil, and I use neufchatel

 cheese in the frosting.  Still not a diet food, by any stretch, but I like to pretend it's healthier.  I need to try it sometime with wheat flour to see what that does to the recipe.  But not on Easter.  I make the bunnies by baking two 9" round cakes.  Each round makes one bunny.  Cut the round in half across the diameter and frost together taco-style.  It will sit on it's cut ends.  You then carve out a little chunk to create a neck and stick that on the other end of the cake for a tail.  You end up with a three-humped cake.  Frost that.  Add jellybean eyes and nose to the head.  The ears you can cut from construction paper and insert into the head.  I often surround the little guys with green tinted coconut and more jelly beans.  (The photo I got on-line.  I don't cover my bunny with coconut, because some of my kids don't like it.  I also make a slightly smaller head by cutting the notch further down the arc.  I think it's a little cuter that way.)

Have a blessed Easter weekend!   And bon apetit!