Here comes Peter Cottontail

Easter is sort of a overlooked holiday. Most people have a fuzzy notion of when the day is, and they have a family dinner or something. Me! I love Easter. Starting some time during Lent, I start decorating. I buy the Easter stuff at the stores after Easter, so I get some really good deals. Then I sprinkle it around the house.

Easter week is spent rounding up all the pieces that make up my holiday. I get my Honey Baked ham, I buy some lamb -- Trader Joe's had some butterflied leg of lamb on sale. I'll grill it outside. I need the best asparagus around. I've scoped out the shops and veggie stands and I'll stick with farmers market asparagus, which is truly pencil thin and insanely expensive. I bought small red potatoes. I bought one of those mixes with yellow, blue and red potatoes for Christmas, but the blue potatoes cook a lot faster than the other two varieties. By the time the red and yellow potatoes were cooked, the blue potatoes had pretty much blown up and dissolved. I threw them out and serves the red and yellow potatoes and vowed not to make the same mistake again.

The Saturday before Easter is the day I dye Easter eggs. I learned the trick to hardboiling eggs years ago and I want to pass it on:

Hard-boiled eggs
Place eggs in the bottom of a non-aluminum pot. Try to have enough eggs to cover the bottom of the pot, but don't crowd them. Pour cool water over the eggs, covering them by about an inch. Heat over high heat until boiling. Unlike other recommendation, I let the eggs boil for about a minute. Then I turn off the heat and let them sit for 15 minutes. I pour off the water, being careful to hold onto the eggs so they don't start cracking into each other. Place the eggs under cold tap water and run it over the eggs until they cool. Place them in reserved egg carton and store in the refrigerator. I like to dye them the next day.

Back when I was a kid, people kept boiled eggs out and ate them. I remember one particularly unhappy Easter when I got food poisoning from a bad egg. I was at the point of illness when you no longer care if you're going to die because dying would be preferable to violently dry-heaving all night, with family members telling you to be quiet because they're trying to sleep. So I make sure my dyed eggs are properly refrigerated. I'll take them out for Easter dinner, but they go right back in the fridge after the feast.