Easter Pizza and Other Adventures

Composing a text message on my ancient flip-model phone, I begin to type the word "easter", but the predictive text function offers "exhaustion" in its place. My dumbphone is smarter than I thought. Predictive indeed, given all the scurrying that major family-visiting holidays seem to require no matter how much advance preparation is undertaken. 

Exhaustion goes with Easter like snow and spring? Like worry and motherhood, like fighting and family, like joy that remembers sorrow and makes room for it. Frankly, I'm too exhausted to continue this line of thought, because it was back to work for me today. I dragged myself around, work-fatigue compounded by post-sugar lows. And wine. There was wine.

I really only wanted to share some pictures.

Because two birthdays coincided with the Easter weekend, we had cakes and gifts galore along with Easter baskets for kids too old to believe in the Easter bunny. Best of all, we had genuine, imported, devoted grandparents and uncles. They liven up the place.

The Unprocessed Project is on hiatus. Although dinners, birthday cakes and Easter pizza (below) were all homemade, I shudder to think how much dye, artificial flavouring, preservative and paraffin wax we ingested this weekend. Never mind. One of the things I'm learning is that we're never going to achieve 100% compliance and that insisting on the rules will just alienate everyone (or else drive them to their friends' houses, which I imagine as slacker paradise: open bars offering unlimited chips and pop and violent video games). Choosing unprocessed food most of the time represents improvement over the old (admittedly more convenient) ways. On balance, we're still better off, albeit imperfect.

The cakes were angel food with whipped cream and strawberries, and chocolate with vanilla icing and strawberries. Unfortunately, we've run out of the local berries I picked and froze in volume last summer, so we bought some. The other great lesson (so far) of the Unprocessed Project is the necessity of planning far, far ahead--figuring out realistic quantities and then freezing or canning that much when produce is in season. 

Birthday girl 1 (15!) decorating sister's cake

Tim with Birthday girl 2--suddenly 20!

There was a third cake. My mother makes a candy cake for each child every year. It consists of an assortment of candy bars stuck with copious amounts of tape to an overturned bowl, with a candle on top. Easy to assemble, great fun, and always a hit. I don't know, she never bought any of that crap when I was a kid. Grandmothers don't care about rules.

Now for the Easter pizza, an Italian concoction my great-grandmother and grandmother both made. According to my unscientific Facebook poll, at least ten other cousins and assorted relatives took the cardiac risk of consuming Easter pizza this year. It is basically a pot pie filled with cheese, pepperoni, ham and egg in alternating layers. It looks like this when you are not good at pastry. (Precision isn't my strong suit; throwing the filling together is a breeze, though.)

The other treat we normally make, but did not get to this year, is Easter egg bread. Also Italian, this slightly-sweet twisted ring is, in my opinion, a chore to eat. Not my favourite, but who am I to fight tradition?

My great-grandmother used to shape this into individual portions, one for each child in the family--dolls for the girls and suitcases for the boys, because she had never heard of gender-neutral toys, nor of suitcases as portents of death. We just make the dolls--here's to equal-opportunity bread dolls! These photos are from 2012.

And finally, our new tradition: the Easter Peep, aka Terry, my brother's wonderful partner. He probably doesn't realize that he's signed on for this role in perpetuity. The Easter Bunny is dead to us.