Happy Easter to everyone!
I decided this year that we should have a special family feast. Plus, I'd heard that lemon pasta is a traditional Easter dish, which sounded delicious. So, obviously, that meant doing things like purchasing a table cloth and little decorations and so on.
Since Palm Sunday involves a distribution of olive branches, I thought it would be sweet to hang little Easter eggs on them. Obviously, I was not the only one with the thought of decorating with eggs: by the time I made it to the store, they were all gone! Florence and I consulted with each other, and decided that we could string up little egg-shaped cookies using Easter-y ribbons as a plan B. And then we found them: dove cookie cutters! Awesome! We stopped by Elizabetta's to get the ribbon; all set!
Saturday involved cookie making and stringing for our table centerpiece. Lots of prep for Sunday's meal, including going to the butcher's (Paola and Andrea have consolidated, and are now only in their original shop in Collevalenza...we miss them terribly!). It was a lovely day for the (10-minute) drive.
Mass was full, and the bishop did a lovely job. Our choir director played his French horn, and he'd roped in another horn player. We also had our mascot violin player: Paolo is about 10; he's Gabriele and Elisa's son, and is an extremely talented violinist. He should be, after all: his father plays horn professionally, his mother sings beautifully, his aunt is a professional pianist (? I think that's the instrument) and so on. Definitely runs in the family!
Coming out of Mass, we were greeted with people in the piazza enjoying the antiques fair. Scurry home to get lunch ready! And, we had:
Devilled eggs (dyed through the cracked shells, since the eggs here are brown!) and Easter bread (it was given to us; I put it out thinking it was the traditional cheesy bread, and it turned out to be a cinnamony bread instead!)
Lemon pasta with capers and salmon
Brocoletti (Interestingly, an element of the Passover seder, namely bitter herbs, is included in an Umbrian Easter dinner) with garlic...yum!
Mashed potatoes
Roast chicken (basted with lard (!), it was the best I've ever had, I think). It was so beautiful, we carved and ate it before I remembered to take a photo. You'll have to imagine it.
We rolled out of the house for a little stroll through the market, where I purchased a lovely fountain pen and a few other items. Michael and I came back to the house to discover that Ashley had polished her halo and had
washed all the dishes! And it was quite a stack: with everything served separately, the number of plates was impressive.
The rest of the day holds some pretty high ambition: dig into the colombe (like a panettone, but for Easter, and in the shape of a dove), play a game, and perhaps have a nap. Michael is packing, since he is leaving tomorrow for a trip back to the US.
Love and peace,
Alexandra
