Monday, April 13, 2009

Thinking Outside the Box for a "Not-Your-Typical" Easter!

We decorated eggs on Friday. Well, I didn't want to make a big mess with egg decorating, so we just used toothpicks dipped in food coloring and stippled onto the eggs in a real "avant garde" method! Fun, SUPER easy clean up, and made me feel like I was one of those Dutch egg painters that do the really detailed paintings on the shells. We had so much fun experimenting with the Lawrences and have some pretty creative results:

We had our egg hunt on Saturday (indoors-- Eric was worried the neighbors might see. :) and saved Sunday for focusing on the Savior and His supernal Atonement. The ward choir production went really well and Eric's solo/duet was beautiful! And then we came home, put our grumpy baby to bed, and proceeded to cook...
As you also may know, we don't buy our meat from the grocery store. We buy it from the Department of Fish and Game... ha ha, what I mean is, Eric buys tags and licenses and then hunts the meat and fishes the fish himself. (okay, so technically since Eric hasn't had time this year it was mostly his Dad that did the hunting and we just benefit from the meat that he shares). Anyway, a traditional American Easter dinner might have ham in there somewhere... but Eric has never hunted wild boar and we aren't even quite sure how we would go about curing the meat into ham... or whether it would taste anywhere near as yummy anyway... so we opted to do something a lil different: we had fried butterflied duck breast medallions on a bed of spinach and salad greens with blue cheese stuffed baked pears all drizzled with a sun-dried tomato vinaigrette dressing. Sounds exotic, no? Well it was surprisingly EASY and absolutely DELICIOUS!!! 5 for flavor and 5 for ease of preparation! Here's the recipe:

4 duck breast halves, butterflied, breaded in 1/2 cup flour seasoned with salt and pepper, and pan fried in 1-2 T vegetable oil
4 pears, cored (go up from the bottom using a melon baller or spoon if you want the entire pear whole or cut in half and core if you don't care), filled with 4 oz crumbled blue cheese, then baked in the oven (lay on their sides, otherwise cheese will melt out) on 350 F for 10-15 minutes until soft.
lay out spinach and desired salad greens on plates, place warm duck in center, and arrange pears on side. Drizzle all with desired vinaigrette dressing (I highly recommend Kraft Sun-Dried Tomato). Wualah! Delicious!
For dessert we had Hazelnut Torte with strawberries. Sounds amazing, and was good, but not compared to dinner. And it was a lot of work. The hazelnut crust was definitely a WOW, but the strawberries and cream layers could just as easily have been plain ole strawberries in whipped cream. Not gross, by any means, but not the rich dessert I thought it would be. Maybe next time I'll make it a cream cheese icing layer instead of whipped cream. Anyway, 4 for flavor and 3 for ease of preparation. I'm including pictures, but if you want the recipe, you'll have to let me know.



So there you have it, a lil different, not-your-typical Easter.... Easter Allan-style!:)

2 comments:

  1. Hmmmmm, it seems pretty easy to determine which eggs are yours and which are Eric's. :)

    Your dinner looks wonderful...we had quite pedestrian ham. We'll be eating it for weeks!

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  2. Duck!?! Wow. I have only eaten duck one time at a fancy restaurant. I did not like it at all, but perhaps it was just cooked weird. Anyway, it looks amazingly delish on your plate. I'm so impressed with your gourmet cooking! Glad you guys had a fun Easter.

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