ILP: Easter Weekend

It is Easter Sunday, and like every other holiday, my family celebrated in a great way: by feasting. We started our cooking process for our meal today last night around 5:00 pm. We marinated our pork loin for 14 hours so that it would be ready to cook today! My dad and I woke up at 7:00 am this morning in order to prepare the pork, ham, and sausage. We took the pork out of the marinade, and started wrapping it in bacon. It took quite a bit of work to find strips of bacon that were long enough to wrap around the meat, but with a large amount of toothpicks, the job was complete. Next, we prepared the ham and sausage by seasoning them with my dad’s secret combination of spices. Finally, we placed all three pieces of meat on the smoker, and allowed them to cook for 4 hours.

After the meat was placed, we left it alone and began preparing the rest of our meal. Because we planned to eat with our relatives at noon, we decided to go for a brunch theme. My mom and I created two egg bakes that were composed of eggs, bacon, sausage,  cheese, and hash browns. These were really easy to make because all of the ingredients were combined and baked. We took the bakes out about two minutes before they were done, added more cheese, and then placed them back into the oven to finish baking. While those were cooking, I prepared some bacon, sausage links, smokey sausages,  potatoes that were seasoned with salt and pepper, some scrambled eggs with cheese, and toast with butter. Next, we began making the dessert options.

What is a feast with no dessert? It is not considered a feast! In order to satisfy our guests’ sweet tooth, we decided to bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch, which were amazing because we used chunks of a real milk chocolate bar rather than the pre-packaged chocolate chips. The taste is so much better, let me tell you! Next, my grandma and I made rice krispie treats, which are probably the easiest treat to ever make! All that we had to do was melt butter, add marshmallows until they are melted as well, and then mix in rice krispie cereal, and finally, pour the mixture into a pan, spread them out, and then cut them when they are cooled. Our last dessert option was a large pan of caramel rolls! My mom and I prepared the dough for these before we went to bed last night, so that they were risen and ready to bake this morning! We created a delicious caramel sauce with butter, brown sugar, vanilla, and orange zest, and poured it in the bottom of a glass pan. We placed the rolls next to each other on top of the caramel sauce, baked them, and then flipped them over onto tinfoil. The result was so pretty and delicious!

Overall, we had a great Easter meal, and I had a blast cooking with my family! This year’s Easter meal was very small in comparison to previous years because we usually go all out for every holiday, but I am glad that we still got to cook a lot of fun food for our family!

Thanks for reading,

Kayla