We had a lovely Easter dinner with J's parents at our place.
I liked my creation of Chick-deviled eggs and mushroom radishes last year, so I made them
again! I added carrot flowers on sliced cucumber. Also I made wild mushroom pâté. I just saw this
recipe on smitten kitchen recently that looked so good. Because the dinner was going to be meat, I wanted non-meat, light small things along with my chicks. These mushroom pâté canapés were perfect. I used mainly fresh cremini mushrooms, a little of fresh oyster mushrooms, a little of fresh shiitake mushrooms, dried porcini mushroom and dried oyster mushrooms. It was very tasty. Surprisingly J liked the mushroom pâté too.
Ok, the dinner was meat - grilled burgers. For me, it didn't sound like Easter, more like Memorial day or Forth of July cookout. Well, it was what J's family wanted. At least I thought it was better than ham. I simply didn't want another ham until we finish the leftover applewood-smoked ham in the freezer since
Thanksgiving 2013. Actually the weather was beautiful. It was a great day for cookout indeed! J and his father grilled bacons and two kinds of burgers - bison and sirloin that J's parents kindly brought.
J kept telling me I didn't have to bake buns if that would be too much task for me. I know he is sweet and kind. However, for such a special event, commercial buns are no-no in my world. We should have fresh soft yummy homemade buns!
Cheese, of course.
This was what I assembled. J's mother made delicious potato salad. Yum, yum.
Here was another side dish according to J's request. First I had proposed pea soup. It would be lovely for Easter celebration. He clearly said NO! because it's not a cookout food. Alright, Easter bunnies, we won't sip elegant green minty pea soup today. Instead, ta-da! 10 hour slow-cooked smoky spicy BBQ beans!! We adapted a recipe from our slow-cooker book with one change - using homemade BBQ sauce instead of commercial one. After 10 hours cooking, the beans has nice bean flavor and texture, but we both agreed something tangy was missing. J added a little more smoked liquid and more BBQ sauce that I made by adapting a recipe of Cook's Illustrated's Kentucky style BBQ sauce. Then, it got better. It became a little spicy for me, but tasted good even for me!
Here's J's burger! It was fun that everyone freely made his/her-own-burger. I wanted to make another one, but with two side dishes, just one burger was a right portion.
Ready for desserts?! I made something light to serve after meaty dinner and not too elegant because of the cookout rules - tricolor semifreddo. I adapted a
recipe of pistachio, strawberry and vanilla semifreddo by bon appetit with some changes. I used high quality commercial pistachio paste instead of graining raw pistachios. I doubled strawberries, maturated them, cooked the juice down a little and pureed all instead of straining. The problem was vanilla layer, which separated into cream layer and icy-hard milk layer. Next time I will swap whole milk with heavy cream and mix the cream, custard and whipped cream just before adding the layer on the strawberry layer. Yet I was happy with the semifreddo. It was cute, Easter/spring color and refreshing.
Very Happy Easter!
