Plan A Gourmet Easter Holiday Dinner

Make this Easter holiday a treat to remember by adding a few unexpected but easy to make goodies to the Easter table.

The first impression your guests will have this Easter is, your holiday table setting so why not jazz it up with unique Easter decorations? Get plain white or light pastel colored tablecloths and some rubber stamps and fabric ink and stamp them with our own design - you can even make fabric napkins to match. For a centerpiece you can simply order a colorful Easter gift basket, or fill fancy silver or china serving bowls with Easter grass, colorful eggs and treats and set them on the table for your guests to pick from.

Before the holiday meal, your guests might want to munch so why not save yourself some time and order gourmet appetizers online and keep them frozen until Easter. Then just pop them in the oven when the holiday time is right. You can buy them fairly inexpensively and no one needs to know you didn’t make them yourself!

A traditional holiday meal for Easter typically has ham as the main course. An easy way to add some zip to an Easter canned ham is to generously coat the top of the ham with brown sugar and then place pineapple rings on top of that. You can buy the pineapple rings in the canned fruit section of the grocery store. Put as many on as you can fit, you can even add the extra to the bottom of the pan. Cook the ham as instructed on the package. Serve a slice of pineapple with the ham to each quest. This will also work on a non-canned ham and tastes great as well as looking festive for the holidays.

Along with the Easter ham, I love to have scalloped potatoes (these are good for any day, holiday or not!). Cut the potatoes into thin slices (the amount depends on how many you are serving and how big your casserole dish is) and boil just until soft but stop cooking before they break apart. Rinse under cold water. Butter a casserole dish and add a layer of the potatoes slices. Add more butter on top of that layer and sprinkle about a tablespoon of flour. Add another layer of the potatoes and repeat until the dish is full. Pour some milk into the casserole – don’t drown the potatoes but pour about enough to to fill halfway up (it helps if you have a see through dish for this). Bake at about 350 for 30 to 45 minutes. After Easter, you can mix some leftover ham into the casserole dish and reheat for a real post holiday treat!

At the end of the holiday meal, a little sweet treat can be great. Since Easter centers around chocolate, I like to put out something that combines chocolate with fruit such as strawberries dipped in chocolate. If you want to be really fancy, you can dip the strawberries in white, milk and dark chocolate for a nice contrast. You don’t have to limit yourself to strawberries either, some cut up pineapple on toothpicks or kiwi will work too.

Holiday Tidbits For Easter

Did you know that the holiday of Easter dates back to the second century when it was celebrated as a pagan festival?

Easter was rarely celebrated as a holiday in America until after the civil war.

The Easter egg actually predates the holiday itself. Exchanging eggs in the early spring has been done for centuries as they are a simple of rebirth. Often times the eggs were colored with gold leaf or by boiling with leaves or flowers.

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