Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Nothing says Easter like March Madness. Wisconsin-Duke set for the men. Notre Dame just squeaked out a win against South Carolina by one point -- early on they had led 15-3, were ahead by 12 some seven minutes to go, then they were behind. Maryland about to attempt to go against UConn -- that's one tough road on the women's side.


Mrs. Dr, Phil made up a shared basket for us and had posted some pictures from her Kindle Fire HDX on Facebook.
©2015 Mrs. Dr. Phil (All Rights Reserved)

It's family tradition that one is not only allowed to eat chocolate before noon, it's the law. So we had some Ghirardelli squares -- milk chocolate with little dark chocolate Easter basket medallion inserts. Yum. But can you believe the store DIDN'T have bags of black jelly beans? What is wrong with people?

Amazon Echo has just added Pandora, so Mrs. Dr. Phil had a Pandora channel nattering on in the background while we read the Sunday paper.

We didn't dye any new eggs this year -- didn't need to. We're getting brown eggs from someone at GVSU these days and so already had some pretty brown hard boiled eggs. (grin)


Little permanent egg display on a kitchen shelf.
©2015 Mrs. Dr. Phil (All Rights Reserved)

And then there was dinner:


Braised lamb shanks in Moroccan spices, leeks sauteed with tomatoes and black olives, couscous, garlic. (Click on photo for larger.)
©2015 Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon (All Rights Reserved)

Yum. Hudsonville vanilla ice cream with brandy for dessert.

Meanwhile the peepers out back are roaring up a storm. It was 55°F today. Rains this week. The daffodils at the edge of the garage are poking up their little heads out of the ground, according to Mrs. Dr. Phil. Spring has arrived.

Easter. Rejoice.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Yes, I Know

Even more so than Christmas, Easter is a holiday which confuses children. So it's not my fault that I still associate Easter with chocolate. Amazingly, this year I did not have chocolate before noon -- my usual criteria for the start of the secular Christmas and Easter.

Last Monday

Having been warned by my mother over the weekend, I checked the P.O. Box on Monday, something I would not normally do. And indeed, there was a box from Greensboro NC. When I opened it -- and I hadn't been expecting anything and certainly not marked Perishable -- I was greeted with purple Easter grass and a note. Seems that my mother and my sister conspired to equip us with Easter basket material.

Our Basket

Mrs. Dr. Phil found an appropriate basket and...


The box came with a package of Peeps. "Best used by 5-2012." But it seems we had another unopened package, "Best used by 4-2011." The latter was definitely firmer. So at lunchtime we did a proper sampling test, eating one each of each type. I think we concluded that the perfect Peep, if one could say that such a thing exists, would probably be inbetween in consistency. I would also say that, despite being wholly in favor of Peeps and all the things that get done to them, in most years the number of Peeps I consume is one or less. Two was a lot. This despite the package pointing out that a Serving Size was five Peeps, or the whole package. Per person.

I don't think I've ever eaten that many Peeps in my life at one sitting. The very thought curdles my stomach.

As for the two hard boiled eggs, actually we had five eggs to hard boil. These two were the best looking. No, we had no plans to decorate them this year. However, two of them were made into deviled eggs for lunch, with a homemade mayonnaise that Mrs. Dr. Phil had made for some potato salad last week, along with some jalapeño relish, since we had no pickle relish lying around. The latter was labeled hot, but it wasn't. (grin)

We discussed the concept of having deviled eggs on Easter, though there is some story about what deviling means and it isn't evil in cooking. Funny thing, someone else on Facebook had to deal with the same conundrum. (evil grin)

Hope your Easter was swell. We had lamb shanks with cumin for dinner -- they were wonderful.

Dr. Phil