Pizza chiena

Back when people took Lent really seriously (ie the Middle Ages), they didn’t just go without meat for 40 days. They went without all animal products, which meant no eggs, no cheese, and no butter either. In light of this information, my mother’s Italian family’s two traditional Easter recipes, which involve three dozen eggs and three pounds of meat and dairy (and that’s before you start multiplying quantities to feed the extended family) make a lot of sense. You cook up a bunch of decadent food on Mardi Gras to clean out the kitchen before Lent’s privations; and by the time Holy Week rolls around, you’ve got another stockpile of the chickens’ and cows’ output for the past six weeks. (It helps in this scenario if you live on a farm.)

Kansas Easter

From top: Italian Easter tarrale; dyeing Easter eggs; Miss B at the Easter picnic; Easter cupcakes; Italian Easter pizza chiene

I hope that you and yours have had a peaceful and joyous Easter, Passover, or first weekend of April.

Challenge engineering

I have two announcements to make:

1. I’ll be running the Cookbook Challenge this month--it's that time again.

2. I’ll be cheating.

Perhaps I should explain that second one.

Most of my cookbooks are either in storage (along with all my other stuff), or in Boston. I do have a small selection here—just enough to make a random selection possible, as the Cookbook Challenge was originally conceived. But I’ve decided that what I really want to do is delve into one of the cookbooks that I took out of the local library a few weeks ago and have been browsing through ever since. I need a reason to focus on making some of the recipes, to see if it’s worth investing in. So I’m going to bend the rules this once and choose the cookbook deliberately, rather than randomly.