Easter Food Preparation

John and I always go to his family's for Easter. My family gets us for Thanksgiving. While I love his family dearly, they aren't exactly foodies. In fact, I don't know if I've met a family that celebrated less with food on holidays. Their traditional Easter foods include ham, baked beans, and potato salad. That's picnic food to me. Moreover, the foods are usually canned or ready-made. To give his mom credit, the potato salad is from scratch. I just don't care for it. I don't like mayonnaise.

Whenever we're celebrating with my in-laws, I always make sure to bring food along that will be good and is a bit special to celebrate the holiday. I have to be careful though because they're tastes aren't as refined as mine, no matter to what degree my are considered refined. While I would like to make a delicious chocolate mousse made with tofu, I cannot. They will not eat tofu, even if bathed in cocoa. And my principles on food will not allow me to lie about what it is. I have some very bad memories of people lying to me about what I was eating. So my food choices must be simple. John enjoys veto power over my choices for this reason.

We drive two hours to get there, so the food must be portable and easy to reheat before dinner. I usually have to make my dishes the day before, like I'm doing today. Any dessert must be similar and not require refrigeration for the entire trip.

Last year I took roasted asparagus and chocolate brownies. Both were gobbled up and enjoyed by all. This year I wanted to be a bit more creative, however, and I wanted the recipes to be clean. After skimming cookbooks and magazines for a while, I finally settled on the following three things to bring:

- Crispy Sesame Carrots
- Butternut Squash Casserole
- Starbucks Coffee Mini-Cupcakes

I got John to approve all the recipes and I'm good to go. Today, I prepped all my dishes and they will only need to be reheated shortly before eating.

After a long morning run, I started with the cupcakes first. I just made a simple chocolate cupcake recipe from allrecipes.com, but I substituted part of the milk required with Starbucks Liquor.
I baked them about 9-10 minutes at 350 degrees. And here's the finished product.
Right before serving, I'll sprinkle with some powdered sugar- no frosting for John's family (Who doesn't like frosting???). John and I sampled one that was broken. It was really good- nice chocolate flavor, but not too sweet.

Next, I put together the Butternut Squash Casserole. I purchased pre-cut and cleaned squash. So I just dumped it in a disposable casserole. I also added:

- 2 cups chopped onions
- 1/3 apple juice
- 2 tbsp olive
- 2 tbsp maple syrup
- 1/2 cup slivered almonds

Mix all together and bake at 350 degrees for a little over an hour covered with foil, until squash is soft and a bit mushy. Mix all together well to incorporate flavors.

Here's the pre-oven dish.
And here's the finished casserole.

While the squash was baking, I started peeling and chopping 5 pounds of carrots! John helped me with this one! Then just mix the carrots with the following in a casserole:

- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp toasted sesame oil
- 2 tbsp sesame seeds (sprinkle these over top after it comes out of the oven).

Mix all together, cover foil, and bake at 350 for about 45 minutes or until carrots are cooked to desired texture.

Here's the pre-oven casserole.
And here's the baked product.

While I was cooking, I ate some oatmeal with Chocolate Amazing Grass, almond butter, sliced banana, and milk. I'm currently having a latte as I blog and do some laundry. Next I'll shower and then try to do some school work before we have to leave to meet my parents and great aunt for her birthday dinner tonight.

I was fully intending to do a post on last night's dinner, the Beef and Mushroom Ragout with Sundried Tomato Polenta. The problem was both John and I hated it. I don't want to post recipes on things that we didn't even really consider edible. So I'm not going to post it. The flavors were off, the texture was bad, and we didn't even see any way to adapt the recipe to fix it. We just decided we'd try a different recipe next time.