Easter Dinner

Last we took a look specifically at how to make great food on a limited budget by stretching one main course into three different meals. This week we'll approach the same idea from a different angle: making one large holiday meal and then using the leftovers over the course of several days.  Easter gave us the perfect opportunity to shop for one large event and have enough food, and varieties of food, to make it last until the next shopping day.

Although we aren't religious at all, we still love to celebrate Easter, just without the pagan leanings of the holiday's origins or the Christian slant the day has taken in modern times.  As a fun nod to both, we color eggs and have a zombie movie marathon (this year we watched the first season of "The Walking Dead" and the zombie episode of comedy TV show "Community"). Here were our eggs, which were done with a tye-dye egg color kit. Later these will get turned into deviled eggs and egg salad sandwiches, which will be covered in a new blog entry down the line.

There a couple of staple items we enjoy making at most holidays that have become a sort of tradition for our family. One of the latest additions to that lineup is a casserole dish that takes this beautiful and healthy green veggie:

And mixes it with this very un-healthy block of equally beautiful Velveeta cheese:

Along with minced fresh garlic and crushed red pepper cooked up in a small amount of butter:

This is a layered dish, that starts out with the broccoli on the bottom, which is then mixed in with the cooked garlic and red pepper so that everything gets properly seasoned.

Then the Velveeta is cut into cubes and mixed throughout. Once the mixture has hit the right balance, the remaining cubes are thrown on top to form a cheese crust. Bread crumbs are then sprinkled on top.

After baking in the oven, here's the finished product with the golden brown bread crumb top. There a whole lot of ways to make broccoli casserole, and this is actually one of the more minimalist interpretations. You can get a good idea of how to make your own by checking out this collection of recipes here.

Green bean casserole is another favorite we love to put together, and as with many traditional dishes there are a lot of different ways to put it together. To start with, cut up strips of bacon into small pieces and pan fry them until they aren't quite crispy. To save yourself a lot of work, use the meat scissors that come with most knife sets and cut through most or all of the strips in the package at once. Toss the bacon in with the canned green beans.  We usually use one full package of bacon to eight or nine cans of green beans. Make sure to fully strain each can, as you don't want any added liquid in the casserole. To save money on this one, we wait to buy green beans until the local Smith's store has a "case lot" sale, in which cases of canned vegetables are sold together. By purchasing a whole case, each can ends up costing about 50 cents, and the remainder can be used as a side veggie for meals.

Normally condensed soup isn't something we get excited about, but green bean casserole is one of the few places where it's actually the best option to use. Instead of making your own filling, throw in three to four cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup and mix thoroughly.

In this case three wasn't quite enough, so we threw in a fourth can to make sure the casserole had the same consistency throughout.

Here is the fully prepped and ready casserole, which we make the day before and place in the refrigerator so there's less to do the day of the holiday feast.

If there's going to be green bean and broccoli casserole, of course there also has to be mashed potatoes! We didn't go nearly as crazy for Easter as happens on Thanksgiving, in which we usually use between 5 to 10 pounds of potatoes. Here's the peeled and boiled potatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper. For a different texture, leave the peels on and consider throwing in some cheese or minced garlic.

To get the creamiest mashed potatoes, use sour cream, milk, and butter when whipping them together.

Pre-packaged gravy or packet mix gravy is usually fairly cheap, but we prefer to fully use all our ingredients and get a better flavor by making gravy from the pan drippings of the bird. For Easter we made chicken instead of turkey. After baking the chicken (covered more fully below), we drain out the drippings into a pan on the stove and start at a low heat.

Slowly add in milk and flour until the drippings start to thicken up and look more like gravy. Throw in whatever seasonings strike your fancy, but definitely use salt and pepper at the least.

Here's the finished thickened gravy and the rolls coming out of the oven. While making our own rolls is always a fun time, for a big meal like this we usually buy the cheapest brown 'n serve rolls at the supermarket and jazz them up by putting slices of butter on top before they go into the oven.

Since we had guests and lots of extra canned veggies for Easter, this year Megan also made a creamy corn casserole. Here you can see all three casseroles in the oven together. To get some inspiration on how to make corn casserole, check out this list of recipes.

Here are some of the finished casseroles and a pan of stuffing. This is another staple that can be made on the cheap by buying boxed stuffing mix, but you don't have to leave it plain Jane and bland. Remember that fantastic chicken stock we made last week? That gets cooked with the stuffing instead of water for a much more robust flavor. You can also pan fry up your own veggies beforehand, like onion and celery, and throw them in with the box mix.

These are the two whole chickens we made, which we found on sale for 89 cents a pound at Albertsons. Because they are much smaller than turkeys, the cooking time is greatly reduced. To prepare these, mix up butter with any of the traditional turkey seasonings, like sage and pepper. Press your fingers under the skin and pull the skin up slightly around the chicken. Use your hands to spread the butter mixture in-between the skin and the meat, which results in a highly flavored bird with a perfect crispy skin. It's messy, but well worth the trouble!

 

And now we've got one heaping plateful with a little bit of everything! After all this we needed to take a nap on the couch of course :)  And there's tons of leftovers, meaning we have plenty more to look forward to throughout the week. Since there were so many different dishes made, it's easy to customize each plate so it never gets boring, and the leftover chicken is great for sandwiches. We'll also again turn the chicken bones into stock for a future meal.