This year, the bread is a sourdough loaf. We have a dry sausage and a small ham. The cheese this year is a brie. The olives are stuffed with cheese. There’s pink salt and honey mustard, and tiny jars with balsamic vinegar and truffle infused olive oil. The butter was whipped with parsley and a bit of the truffle infused olive oil. We also have two types of pickled eggs, one with beet juice. Then there’s all the little chocolate eggs all over.
I did have prosciutto as well, but at the last minute decided not to include it. I think we had enough in there.
After blessing, what needed to go in the fridge got put back in the fridge, and we will enjoy the contents for our Easter breakfast tomorrow.
Our basket has been put together and blessed, in preparation for tomorrow, when we enjoy the contents as part of our Easter celebrations.
Our traditional Easter baskets were one of my favourite things, when I was a kid. I loved our Easter celebrations more than Christmas – plus, I usually have my own tiny basket for blessing, too!
Everything in the basket has symbolic meaning. Along with the Polish traditional items, we’ve added a few of our own, over the years.
The most important part of the basket is the bread, which represents the Body of Christ. Many people use a paska, or babka, bread, made with saffron and raisins. We’ve made braided breads similar to challah, or purchased a rustic loaf of some kind. During blessings at church, I’ve seen people with nothing but a loaf of rye bread in their basket. It’s the one thing no Easter basket would be without! This year, we made a simple, overnight bread.
Of course, there are eggs, which represent resurrection and rebirth. They can be elaborately decorated pysanki, with the designs also having symbolic meaning, plain coloured or shelled. In our basket, we have shelled eggs that were pickled in the liquid from pickled beets, a soy sauce brine and turmeric. You can tell by the colours, which is which! We also have kraszanki (kra-shan-kee); eggs boiled with onion skins. Plus we added some little chocolate eggs.
The sausage represents God’s favour and generosity, while the ham represents great joy and abundance.
Salt (we used truffle salt this time, simply because we had some) represents prosperity, justice, and is a reminded that we are to be the “salt of the earth”.
Butter (I made a parsley butter this time) reminds us of the good will of Christ, which we should also hold towards all.
Cheese (we have a cheese ball, this time) represents moderation.
Other traditional items include horseradish (ours is still frozen in the ground), which represents the bitter Passion of the Christ. It is often shredded and mixed with beet juice to make ćwikla (chveek-la or chveek-wa) symbolizing the Blood of Christ, and bacon, representing God’s overabundant generosity and mercy.
This time, we have a little jar of apple cider vinegar, though we’ve used many other types of vinegar over the years. This represents the vinegar, or sour wine, that was given to Jesus just before he died on the cross, and represents judgement, purification, humility and redemption.
Some years, we also include olives and olive oil, both of which figured prominently in the culture of the time (still does, in some places). The olive represents peace, beauty, prosperity and the relationship between God and His people. In the Bible, the olive tree itself represented Israel and its people. I actually did get olives for the basket, but forgot about them when we put it together, but they will be included tomorrow.
May today be a day of great joy and blessings for you and yours!
Our basket this year included a multi-grain bread, figs and port sausage, ham, olives stuffed with blue cheese, a wheel of brie, salt, mustard with horseradish, parsley butter, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and hard boiled eggs, all of which received the traditional blessing.
My daughter was sweet enough to take photos of Easter brunch from our basket for me to share.
She even used a couple of the Lavender Rose China we inherited from my late MIL as part of the display. She made it all look so pretty!
Unfortunately, my husband had an unusually bad pain day and was not able to join the girls. In fact, I don’t think he even ate at all until shortly before I got home. :-(
As for myself, I left early for my mom’s to make sure I had time to fill her gas tank first (gas prices have gone down a few pennies to 169.9 cents per litre). We had a short visit before walking across the street with her walker to her church. Having the church so close is one of the main reasons she chose to move to where she is! :-D It was an excellent service, and I quite appreciated the homily. After church, we headed out to my brother’s place.
There are two routes that I’m familiar with to get to their place. Normally, I’d take a more straightforward route on the highways, bypassing the city, to get to the town my brother lives in. My mother, however, insists on a route that takes us through a smaller city, where we have to cross an insanely narrow bridge over a major river. Which isn’t too much of a problem in my mother’s little car, but every time I take that bridge with our van, I feel like I’m either going to hit oncoming traffic, or scrape the guardrails! My mother is so insistent on taking the “right” route (which she thinks is a short cut), that when I got distracted and turned towards the city (my usual route) instead of the other direction to take a cross road to another highway, she actually got furious and started shouting at me for going the wrong way.
It took half a minute to circle around, and I was able to calm her down, but even for her it was a bit much to get so angry, so fast.
There turned out to be an irony about this.
Things were more pleasant as the drive continued. We got to the smaller city and drove through it to the bridge and…
It was closed.
Which… of course it would be. With the snow we’ve recently had, and the bridge being so narrow, now that I think about it, yeah, it would be. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn it was closed through most of the winter.
So we bypassed the bridge and got onto another highway towards the bigger city. However, in taking this route, we were passing through a more populated area, so the speed limits were all much lower. Which means that we probably ended up taking at least half an hour longer to get there than if we’d gone the route I almost took out of habit that she yelled at me for!
The irony was not lost on her!
When we realized the bridge was closed, I pulled over long enough to message my brother to let him know about the bridge, and that we would be a bit longer. As I was getting back on the road, I noticed it was just starting to snow.
The weather forecast for today was for either isolated flurries, or up to 6cm/2in of snow, depending on which app I looked at. Until then, the day had been completely clear. Within minutes, we were driving into ever heavier snowfall. Thankfully, it was warm enough that it melted as soon as it hit pavement, but visibility got quite poor in places.
When we finally got to the last leg of the journey, approaching a road I could have taken for a shorter route to my brother’s, we kept on going because it was blocked by a train! It was quite a while before we finally passed the end of the train, and I was actually starting to wonder if it would be clear of our next possible turn off when we got there. Thankfully, it was, so there were no more delays in getting to my brother’s.
The visit was absolutely fantastic. We had a fantastic time seeing each other, a wonderful dinner and, best of all, I got lots of baby snuggles!
So many baby snuggles.
Unfortunately, the snow did not lessen any and we left far earlier than we wanted to. It’s a good thing we did. While the roads were still good, they were very wet, and would have soon started to freeze. As it was, the further north we got, the snow was less, but I could see it starting to freeze over in places.
After dropping my mother off and continuing home, the highway was actually much better and almost dry, until I got about 5 or 10 minutes from home, when I drove into snow again, but it was just snowy enough to impact visibility a bit, not road conditions.
One thing we did see a lot of was deer! Not often. Just lost of them. On our way out, we passed a field that had maybe 20 deer scattered around it. On my way back, just as I was slowing down to turn off the highway, I saw what had to be at least 30 deer in a field. A group of at least 10 were just lying in the snow! I’ve seen some fairly large herds of deer in the area over the years, but this group was easily the most I’ve ever seen of white tail deer, all at once.
The girls were sweet enough to set aside portions from our basket for me, which was much appreciated by the time I got home.
I did notice that, by the time I got home, the kibble was all gone, so I topped that up before going in.
I saw very few outside cats this morning. As I was leaving, I startled a skunk, and it ran under the cat’s house. As I walked by, I could see it’s adorable, pointy little nose poking out, as it watched me leave. When I got back, there was another skunk – or maybe the same one – poking around the kibble house trays, trying to find something to eat.
Potato Beetle, meanwhile, remains in the sun room, and has his very own bowl of food that he doesn’t have to share with any other cats. Or skunks… birds… deer… When I got home, he actually made a “dash” for the door to get outside. He can’t dash very quickly right now, with his injured leg, so that wasn’t much of a problem.
What is more of a problem is the fact that the litter box remains completely unused. Which means he’s found a corner in the sun room somewhere that he’s using, instead. *sigh* It’s a good thing the sun room has a concrete floor!
Rolando Moon was following me around while I was doing my morning rounds, and enjoys running ahead, then rolling on the ground. I couldn’t resist sharing this picture, when I realized her tongue is sticking out!
What a silly kitty!
As I write this, we’re now heading towards 10pm. It’s still snowing a bit, and gotten cold enough for it to finally start accumulating. It’s not the first time we’ve had snow for Easter, of course, but usually that’s been when Easter was earlier in the month! Last night, we hit lows of -17C/1F, that I know of, and the sun room thermometer actually dipped below 0C/32F. Potato Beetle made use of the warming lamp and was just fine. Tonight, the low is supposed to be only -7C/19F, though the wind chill is supposed to be -14C/7F. Starting tomorrow, however, we’re supposed to reach highs above freezing, and stay there from now on, with lows barely dipping below freezing over the next few days. In a couple of days, we’re supposed to get a mix of rain and snow, but today’s snow should be our last blast of winter.
But then, we thought we were getting the last blasts of winter a couple of times now, only to have the forecast change, quite a lot, over and over! However, looking at our 30 year average, and record, highs and lows, I think we’ll be leveling off and warming up from now on.
Even with the snow, however, today was a fantastic Easter!
I hope you and yours also had an excellent day, filled with food, family and fun!
Today, we assembled our traditional Polish Easter basked and blessed it. If you wish to learn more about the symbolism of its contents, you may wish to visit this site. (link will open a new tab)
Over the years, we modified, dropped or added items with complementary symbolism. In the tiny jars, we have salt (traditional) red wine vinegar, mustard and olive oil (non-traditional). Normally, we’d have horseradish root, but ours is buried under snow, and we don’t use it enough to warrant a jar, however the mustard we chose this year has horseradish in it. The olives are non-traditional, and while eggs are traditional, this year we have pickled eggs, which is not. The bright yellow and white ones are the turmeric eggs we tried this year; the white spots are from being a tight fit in the jar! :-D The cheese, ham, sausage and bread are all traditional, as is the butter in a small glass. Usually, I put that in a small bowl with a cross made of cloves pressed into it, but it gets hard to fit the containers, so I melted some butter and poured it into a glass, instead. The one concession to a typical North American basket are the little chocolate eggs. The whole thing gets covered with a pretty cloth. I’ve got several hand embroidered, some antique, clothes I like to use. The one chosen for this year is actually under the basket as I took the picture. We skipped the sprigs of greenery because we usually just don’t have any fresh greenery around Easter.
Over the years, we’ve included prosciutto roses (in place of the traditional bacon), marzipan shaped into a lamb and flowers, a bottle of wine, a white candle, and fruit. An apple, grapes or figs would all by symbolically appropriate.
Normally, after the basket has been blessed, we’d put things away in the fridge until tomorrow, when it will be the basis of our Easter brunch. This year, however, it’s cold enough that we can put it all into the old kitchen, which is easily as cold as a fridge!
As I will be out for much of the day, I don’t know when I will have a chance to write a post. So I will take this moment to wish you all a happy and blessed Easter, from the Re-Farmer family to yours!
I hope that your day was full of joy and blessings.
Our favourite tradition is our Easter basket.
The traditional items include bread (I made a challah this year), eggs (half were pickled, half were coloured with beet juice), ham, sausage, cheese (goat cheese with herbs this year), horseradish (we purchased a spread this year, as our ground it still too frozen to dig up fresh roots), butter and salt. In place of the traditional bacon, we twisted prosciutto rosettes. Among the non-traditional items, we have mustard, olive oil, wine vinegar and olives (almond stuffed, this year). Other items that some people like to include are wine, grapes or an apple, a bottle of wine, or a single white candle. Every item has symbolic meaning. It’s not in the photo, but the basket was covered with a hand embroidered linen cloth; a small table cloth, stitched and gifted to me by my godmother, many years ago. I have a small collection of hand embroidered linens that I like to use to cover our baskets. Lots of people cover their baskets with crocheted lace doilies.
Typically, the basket would be taken to church for blessing on Holy Saturday (as my mother was able to do), but we blessed it ourselves again, this year. I’ve seen people with very elaborate baskets, with added decorations on the basket itself, along with sprigs of flowers, greenery or pussy willow branches. I’ve also seen baskets as simple and elegant as a loaf of rye bread in a small basket covered with a cloth napkin.
The pharmacy my daughter works at now has a small yarn display. Yay! I saw some t-shirt yarn and grabbed it, because I haven’t seen t-shirt yarn in stores in ages.
I made a basket.
It’s 5 kittens big.
Beep Beep tried to get in with them, but it’s not 5 kittens plus mama big. :-D
For my fellow crocheters, the yarn is Madolinni, 97% cotton 3% lycra and 130 meters. It’s 100% “recycled product from the textile industry”. Unfortunately, it turned out to be much coarser and unpleasant to work with, compared to what I was expecting from a t-shirt yarn, but it does make a very sturdy basket.
The base is a disc done in single crochet, starting from 7 stitches, and increased rounds worked in a spiral until about 9 inches across. The first round for the sides is single crochet worked in the back loop only. The next 4 rounds were done in split single crochet, then I switched back to normal single crochet for the remaining rows. This resulted in an almost cauldron shape. The handles were made by making chains of 10 and skipping 7 stitches, on opposite sides. In the next round, a single crochet was worked into each stitch, including into each chain stitch. One more round of single crochet was done, then it was finished with a round of slip stitch worked into the sides of the final round of single crochet, to add stability and reduce stretch.
For those who are not into crochet, here are more kitties!
Of all the cats that were curious about the kittens, Two Face wasn’t really one of them.
Until we started taking the kittens out and putting them on my bed to run around.
She suddenly turned into a mother!
Beep Beep is her mother, but now Two Face is jumping into the nest to mother her mother, and her little siblings. The kittens are even trying to nurse on her! With her belly still half nekkid from being fixed, the nips are easy for them to find. :-D I think they are confused about not getting any milk, though. :-D
The kittens are almost big enough to start scrambling out of their nest! We’re going to have to find a way to get them back into the basement, and walling off a corner or something, where there is less for them to get into and potentially hurt themselves. Plus, they are going to need room for food/water bowls and a litter pan, so they learn how to use them, soon!
The Re-Farmer 