Ease into Easter

WE recently celebrated the festive foods of easter with a Slow Food event at the cookery school. A few weeks before the event, we had put some eggs in an incubator.

Lo and behold, 21 days later little chicks started to chip and peck their way through the shells. There was such excitement. Most of the students had never seen a chick hatching.

For extra pizzazz, Rosalie made several Easter trees and arrangements and Mary Jo McMillin, from Ohio, made Easter bunny biscuits to hang on the trees.

Slow Food events are convivial affairs so people were greeted with a glass of mulled apple juice or homemade lemonade before Rory O’Connell, Mary Jo and I demonstrated a variety of Easter dishes.

Sweet succulent spring lamb is an absolute must for Easter so we made two racks of lamb into a ‘guard of honour’ and served it with gratin of potato and mushroom and three sauces - fresh mint chutney, redcurrant jelly and a sauce soubise. We also made my favourite Easter Sunday pud - new season’s rhubarb tart.

Mary Jo made a wonderful batch of hot-cross buns - the dough for these needs to be soft and sticky. It’s difficult to handle but the result is tender crumb speckled with juicy raisins and sultanas and candied peel.

Easter is very much about eggs, which have, since ancient times, been a symbol of rebirth and resurrection.

We saved the onion peelings from the school for several days and then cooked hardboiled eggs in boiling water with onion peels, in the time-honoured way. The shells became a beautiful brown. You can produce a variety of colours using vegetable dyes but we often use magic markers to decorate the eggs laid by the hens on Good Friday.

On Easter Sunday, our ‘hens’ lay gaily decorated eggs with the children’s and grandchildren’s names, so there’s wild excitement collecting the eggs for breakfast.

At the Slow Food event we also made Easter egg nests - so easy with melted chocolate and Rice Krispies and little chocolate speckled eggs. Mary Jo then made some more grown-up Easter meringue nests and filled them with a bitter chocolate mousse.

We made lots of Penny’s Easter buns and iced them with a lemon icing. The children’s had mini eggs on top and the adult ones were decorated with handmade crystallised primroses and violets.

Finally, the piece de resistance: a simnel cake, our traditional Easter treat - a rich fruit cake with a thick layer of almond paste in the centre. The cake is also iced with almond paste and decorated with 11 balls of marzipan which represent the 11 apostles. Judas, who betrayed Jesus, is not represented.

The whole cake is then glazed with egg yolk and toasted. We ate it while it was still warm. Later, we laid out all our festive foods on a long table in the conservatory and had a delicious afternoon tea.

Happy Easter.

* For details of Slow Food Ireland, visit www.slowfoodireland.com or email [e-mail]