Easter Weekend

Happy Easter Everyone! I hope that you all had a great weekend filled with food, eggs, and cheer. This weekend was a Houston weekend for me. So on Thursday night, I packed up the car (with way too much stuff... and the cat) and headed down to Houston. Friday day was a relatively uneventful working day, but by 4pm the weekend had started. After a happy hour trip to Boondoggles with some friends, Jeremy and I headed over to the Lillard's for some egg dying fun. Somehow we wound up dying over 11 dozen eggs! Yea, that's a lot of eggs. Apparently we would be using them later in the weekend for some egg cracking fun. Some of the unique eggs included zombies, yellow polka dot bikinis, eyes, and others I can't even remember. Heather showed me this cool trick that some of the kits came with. They are those little clear/decorated plastic sleeves for the eggs. You stick them around the egg then you put the egg in boiling water and it shrink wraps around it. I found this highly amusing, and somehow I never remember doing this before.

Saturday started out with a great bike ride down to Morgan's point, over the Kemah bridge to 96 and then back up Egert bay, for about a 44 mile ride. It was a great last ride, before the MS150 next weekend! The rest of the day was spent like a typical lazy Saturday. Hung out with some friends at their garage sale, took a nap, listened to DC3 practice, and then went to Tokyo Bowl! For those of you that don't know, this Clear Lake sushi restaurant is the best sushi ever! Okay, well maybe not ever, but I haven't found a better place yet.

On Easter Sunday we woke up early and made a bunch of appetizers for dinner later that night. Somehow, I went overboard again and made chocolate bunnies, chocolate fruit cups, guacamole, caramelized onion dip, to die for dip, and chocolate covered strawberries (the berries were on sale at HEB for 97 cents a pound, so I just had to get them). I think I just get so excited about cooking, I can't pick my favorite recipe, so I wind up making them all. After food prep, we headed over to the Lillard's who were nice enough to host 26+ people at their house for Easter dinner. We wound up having enough food for like 60 people! But it was all so wonderful! The "to die for dip" that I made went over really well! It's on cooks.com and I totally recommend making it. I omit the crackers in the recipe, use a bit more green onions, and then serve it with corn chips. After dinner, Betsy put together an egg hunt for us. I forgot how much fun egg hunts were! And because there were only two kids there that could walk, all the adults got to play. We also played a game called "egg knocking." I've never done this before, but you get two hard boil eggs and knock them tip to tip. One breaks and one doesn't, the one that doesn't wins. After 11 dozen eggs, the last one standing is a winner! This was sooo much fun. Everyone really got into the game, and although the dyed eggs turned our hands colors, it was a blast! Finally, as dessert time rolled around, we started thinking of things that we could deep fry. Randy had deep fried the turkey for dinner that night, so all the oil was already set up. We tried twinkies, oreo's, cheesecake, blue marshmallow peeps, snickers, bananas, and sweet potatoes. The twinkies turned out like cream filled doughnuts, the oreos tasted like oreo cake, and the snickers just didn't make it too well.

Overall it was a great weekend! Thanks to everyone who helped out and cooked food over Easter, and thanks again to the Lillards who opened their house for Easter festivities all weekend long. Check out my profile on facebook for more pictures from the weekend!