Easter vs. Miss Put-Upon, Round 2

Oh Easter. It's full of such memories...hours of church, lilies causing allergies to explode, 80-degree days followed by unexpectedly frigid Easter egg hunts...but mostly what I associate Easter with is food. And family. Slash Jesus. But namely, food. Last year was the first Easter that I couldn't spend with my family and their smorgasbord, but I was excited to create my own Easter feast like a Real Adult. One ham, some kind of side dish that I can't remember, and a majorly failed dessert later, I had succeeded...in giving myself an epic bout of food poisoning. My enthusiasm for the leftover ham that I had been looking forward to thus voided completely, I don't think that I have been able to eat ham since.

This year I'm trying for an adult Easter again, only I'm not in charge of the ham, or of much else.  My friend and I decided to co-host (read: I buy into the idea, she hosts at her apartment, and I show up just like everyone else) a potluck Easter dinner.  The guests have been asked to bring a variety of items, and I'm a little bit afraid that we'll have a bunch of rolls and not enough beer (I should maybe try to have more faith in my friends, but it's a legitimate concern). The one thing that no one signed up for was dessert. Of course, any Easter dinner worth Jesus' time should have dessert, so I volunteered to bring one.  Which is not such a stellar plan, because I am notoriously bad at baking, primarily because I consistently fail to read the directions through fully. But! it's my Easter Duty so I press forward--and I hope that you can benefit from my step-by-step Easter potluck instructions.

Step 1: Remember that it's Easter. You've been planning on this dinner for weeks so of course that means you're forgotten that it's this weekend. Quick! Figure out what dessert you will bring...it can't be something you've never made before...but your baking repertoire only consists of 3-4 items that are tried-and-true edible.

Step 2: Consult your favorite Web site. So you spent the entire day walking around looking at cherry trees, talking to your friends, and pondering on the baked good you'll bring to the Easter potluck, which is now tomorrow. End up deciding to make something like a blondie crossed with a lemon bar even though that blatantly violates the Must Have Made It Before Rule. You like to live on the edge.

Step 3: Visit the grocery store. While you're there, wonder why in the world there are so many people there on a Saturday afternoon.  See the giant pile of hams and remember that it's Easter again. Smugly remembering past adventures with brown sugar, buy a new bag.  While standing in the baking isle, remember that you forgot to check on whether you had baking powder and baking soda before you left the house, because when you walked to the kitchen to look, you got distracted by jelly beans. It's cheap so buy some more, but gamble on whether you have eggs.

Step 4: Double check the recipe and your ingredients. Reading ahead is key in baking. Notice that the butter needs to be melted, and microwave the lemons for a few seconds to get more juice out (just like they showed you on Food Network!). Pat yourself on the back because things are going so unexpectedly well. Get excited about using the neglected microplane part of the grater for the lemon zest. Note that you did already have both baking powder and baking soda. Note also--with relief--that your roommate has eggs, which you will steal shamelessly.

Step 5: Begin screwing it up. Lemons are hard to zest when they have already been juiced. And zest is remarkably hard to get out of the microplane. There's lemon juice in all the paper cuts you accumulated at your desk job over the past week.  The brown sugar is lumpy anyway because you forgot step 2 of the recipe, even though you read the whole thing through three times. Throw the whole thing in the pan and walk away. Concoct a plan to buy cookies on the way to dinner and pretend you made them. Return to the kitchen 25 minutes later and notice that the cookies are actually much thicker than in the picture and not nearly done in the allotted time. Begin to fret about how much longer they need and when they will be overdone.

Step 6: Take your best guess. After about 25 toothpicks have donated their lives to the effort, conclude that you would prefer underdone brownie-like baked goods to overdone ones, and that they are probably fine anyway. Let cool, then notice that the middle is actually not quite done. Consider putting them back in the oven and then wonder at yourself for thinking that would be a good idea. Decide that overdone baked goods might in fact have been better after all because squishy ones don't look too delicious.

Step 7: Plan how to drop them on the table anonymously. And if they find out that you're the one who brought the mushy cookies, hope that some of the attendees will remain friends with you regardless.

Black Eyed Peas and FAIL

Every New Year, we are supposed to eat "good luck" foods.  I don't really know if this works, but I'm going to go with it since last year I didn't do this and some not-so-good things went on in there.  While in reality things might be exactly as they are supposed to be, they kind of stung, so to me this year, "having good luck" means "avoiding suffering." What foods are good luck, you ask? Well, really, since every culture has their own superstitions, pretty much anything goes.....noodles, fish, round baked goods (really, I read it on the Internets). In the South, black eyed peas and collard greens, and some throw in red rice for good measure (it contains bacon, so I am for it). Apparently collard greens symbolize that foldin' money, and black eyed peas (sometimes cooked with a dime in them?? Did no one ever tell you how DIRTY money is?) show prosperity because they increase in size when cooked. Pork products symbolize moving forward because of the way pigs root (I'm not really sure if that is true but because Wikipedia says so, it must be). Furthermore, during the War of Northern Aggression, the damned Yankees didn't steal these items because they thought they were only good for animal fodder. Personally, I love all the many and varied gifts that come in pig-shaped packages, have never been known to leave a carb behind, and though I am not really a fan of black eyed peas, I will like them because the Yankees didn't. I'm sticking to the rice and peas though because I don't like collards (there I said it) and Northerners have yet to show me an opinion on them.

Now, this is a first for me; I have not exactly made these things before.  Yes, I have made beans of various types and it has not ever turned out well.  They soak for hours and cook for even more hours and are still hard and don't taste very good. I'm already sweating the planning for the bean cooking because I know they are going to annoy and disappoint me, but that's nothing I haven't experienced before.

What is truly new is this red rice thing. I hadn't thought about it much until over Christmas, when a certain someone who shall remain nameless informed me that red rice is a giant pain in the A**. This hadn't occurred to me since I was pretty sure I had mastered the Art of Boiling Water. So the first thing I did after a 7-hour drive back up to DC on Sunday was leap out of the car and look up a recipe so I could begin to prepare myself for this, and did you know it is made in a casserole dish? I don't even know if I have the right recipe but this is what I am going with. So, for your cooking pleasure, a completely untested, possibly incorrect recipe that I will be making tomorrow. And since I plan on being hung over (Hi, Mom!), it will be even more heinous challenging.

Savannah Style Red Rice

4 to 6 9-12 slices bacon
1 medium onion, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped (Celery only comes in large amounts though so I am skipping this)
1/2 bell pepper, chopped (UM or a whole one since they don't come in HALVES)
2 cups uncooked rice (I estimated that I have enough and didn't buy more. Considering my previous measurement eyeballing skills, this was probably a mistake)
3 1/2 cups of chicken broth
1 can of tomato paste
2 teaspoons salt, or to taste (Read:  you are gonna put in TOO MUCH)
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 scant teaspoon sugar (Only someone from Georgia would consider "scant" a valid measurement)
3 or 4 drops Tabasco, or to taste (It's a fine line between a pleasant level of heat and burning your roommate's face off)

Ponderous Steps:  
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cook bacon slices in a large skillet over medium high heat until crisp (and there's grease everywhere and you've set the smoke alarm off 3 times).
3. Remove bacon, and drain on paper towels, reserving 2 tbsp drippings in skillet. Crumble bacon and set aside.
4. Saute chopped onions and pepper in hot drippings over medium heat for 3 minutes or until tender.
5. Add tomato paste to skillet, stirring until mixture is smooth (or burned).
6. Gradually stir in chicken broth, stirring to loosen particles from bottom of skillet.
7. Stir in sugar, salt and pepper.
8. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, and simmer, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes (the longest 10 minutes of your life. Simmering is such a fine line).
9. Stir in rice and bring to a boil.
10. Stir in bacon pieces (the BEST PART)
11. Pour mixture into a lightly greased (or alternatively, heavily buttered) baking dish bake for 1 hour or until rice is tender (We both know it won't be an hour. And then you'll spend 30 extra minutes standing by the oven, opening and closing it and poking at the rice trying to estimate whether it's done).


Makes 8 normal people side dish servings but since this is dinner by itself, probably only like 3.