New Traditions Part 2

I suppose I should get to the Part 2 of this blog post and tell you about the new Easter Traditions.

Well, to be perfectly honest, this Easter 2010 was rather anomalous for my brother, sister and I were all in the same place at the same time, and what with the sister and brother-in-law having recently moved to Australia, that's unlikely to be replicated soon. But still, the day merits recollection.

But before I get to Easter Sunday, a pause on Saturday. In anticipation of my brother-in-law and sister moving to Australia on Thursday, April 8, they decided to have a sort of open house the previous Saturday whereby their friends could just drop by and say au revoir. Thinking that they probably would not have had much time to do any cooking, what with the packing! and the cleaning!, I decided to make some food.

And boy did I cook. First, I made a three-cheese-lasagne-with-sausage-beef-and-spinach. Yes, you got that right: I said three different kinds of cheese (mozarella, ricotta (well, I couldn't find ricotta in my supermarket, oddly enough, so I used some regular generic cottage cheese, which I think is more or less the same thing) and parmesan), spicy sausage, ground beef, and then about 10 ounces of spinach. That lasagne packed quite the mighty wollop and, if I dare blow my own horn (as though I have ever stopped myself before), was quite tasty!

Also, I made a pumpkin cheesescake. Yes, you got that right: think creamy deliciousness (oh, and by the way, a lot of creamy deliciousness in the form of three 8 oz. cans of cream cheese) mixed with pumpkin puree and just pinches of tasty ingredients like cinnamon, nutmeg, ground ginger, vanilla essence. Of course, the experience required me to jaunt off to Williams-Sonoma to buy an electric mixer (for I have been informed that no, one could not whip 24 oz. of cream cheese together to get the right consistency for cheesecake), which is one hell of a scary shop: there are kitchen things everywhere you look! Fortunately, I was able to ask some customer representative to point me in the direction of electric mixers. I came across, oh, say 4,580 of them, but fortunately saw a sign which said "Kitchen Aid," which I seem to recall from somewhere meant that the product was decent. And thus was my process of elimination.

Now, back to the point of this post, which was about Easter Sunday. So, my brother and his girlfriend stayed over on Saturday night rather than return to New Jersey. We all woke up on Sunday, and quickly dressed. We met my sister at Church of St. Apostle at 60th and Columbus Avenue -- it was actually very nice to attend mass with your family. I enjoy doing that at Christmas time when I am home in India. Thereafter, once the religious obligations were done, off we went to . . . Tiffinwala, down in Curry Hill at 28th Street and Lexington. Since we were done opening our hearts to the Lord, we opened our stomachs (through our open mouths) (everything seems open in this sentence, doesn't it? Rather disturbing). Anyway, we scarfed down piles of South Indian food (and when I say "scarfed" I mean "scarfed." I think my brother's girlfriend was seriously disturbed to find out that she was but half-way through her meal and the rest of us were done.

So that's what I did on Easter Sunday.