The Visit of the Easter Bunny

Two or so days ago, the maternal Bunny declared herself quite satisfied to leave the Easter preparations to a consortium of some or all of her children. So I did the remaining planning — an Easter breakfast and a dinner with roast lamb were already a given — and Mama unbent insofar as she did housecleaning and part of the shopping, and Ge. and J. took care of the rest of the purchases. This night I was up and about anyway, having gone to sleep around 3 p.m. and woken up some eleven hours later, and together with Ge. and J. cleared off and set the table.

In case anyone cares, a glass of yellow tulips stands in the middle of the table, on top of a potato-brown, lacy round cloth; underneath there is a tablecloth of white linen, with turquoise and white placemats around. I put plain white bread-and-butter plates at every place, the cutlery, and our plaid napkins.

Besides I made a yeast dough for buns, which should probably be called brioches since they were sweetish, according to a recipe from our big, eye-candy cake book from Dr. Oetker. The dough rose beside the oven (covered in clingwrap which traps condensation and prevents the surface of the dough ball from drying out), and I gave it a second kneading eventually, after which it reassured me by rising far more.

I boiled one batch of three white eggs, which T. and I decorated with aquarell pencils, and then one batch of five or six brown and white eggs with onion skin to dye them a pale or darker brown. By coincidence I had recently read (here) that the 'proper' way to boil an egg so that it is soft and devoid of a olive-green ring around the yolk, is to bring it to a boil in plenty of water with the usual salt (without a lid, but I kept on the lid most of the time because the environmental benefits of heat-saving seemed more important), and then to turn off the heat and leave the egg in the water for fifteen minutes with the lid closed. So I did this with the second batch; it seems to have worked. For reasons of sanitation I still feel inclined to boil eggs for a handful of minutes, then shock them in cold tap water, as I have done for most of my life. During the breakfast I made fresh eggs which were supposed to be 'soft-boiled' . . . I left them in too long.

Then Ge. and J. and I distributed the marzipan (little bars with fig/vodka, apple/calvados, pineapple, etc. flavouring), chocolate eggs, and lots of squares from chocolate bars (white, nougat, marzipan-filled, dark and milk) over the plates, over the tablecloth, and over one of those delightful Tuscan plates with the raspberry and yellow and dark blue patterns and a rooster in the middle.

Mama, once she woke up, went to the bakery for buns and croissants, and at the last moment I made tea and coffee (I forgot the paper filter so water and coffee grounds quietly splattered all over and, as if a soaked chamois cloth and towel weren't enough evidence of the answer, I wondered where the extra four cups of water had gone), and Ge. heated milk for hot chocolate and the coffee. With the freshly baked brioches we had sliced gouda, black currant jam, sliced egg; and a plateful of cold cuts — among them prosciutto di Parma, which I rolled up loosely.

Gi. has Been Abroad for the last couple of days, so he told us about his sojourn at a lakeside in the Tyrolean region of Italy, with one of the families (the other two families being relations of ours) for whom he babysits. Until last night we had tried in vain to guess his location, which he didn't tell us; it was one of his subtle raising-and-reversal-of-expectation pranks. His hint was that he was in an 'enviable' place. I thought he was somewhere like Mallorca, even though that island is slightly pooh-poohed as a tourist enclave in our household, so the envy wouldn't have been massive. The mystery unravelled as subtly as it had begun when he laid a newspaper in Italian out on his desk, and waved a toothpaste package in the same language under our noses.

If all goes as planned, we will have lamb with sage and garlic for dinner, and a Greek salad (for which I am already steeping the onion in a white wine vinegar and olive oil dressing, with apple cider vinegar in lieu of the missing second tablespoon of white wine vinegar) as well as green beans and flatbread. I've thought of making it a three-course meal, with ouzo as an apéritif, mezze like dolmates where the Italians would serve antipasti, the Greek salad alongside the lamb as the main course, baklava as dessert, and little cups of coffee afterwards. But I didn't put antipasti on the shopping list though toasted flatbread and black olives might work, and nobody bought the baklava, though the Honigkuchen which Ge. worked is a respectable though not at all Hellenic alternative. Altogether I think the whole thing would be fiddly anyway; if preparing things for an impatient and hungry family has taught me anything, it's firstly that man proposeth and God disposeth, and secondly that one shouldn't footle about in such an important matter as Bodily Sustenance.