Chocolate for Breakfast and an English Easter Dinner

If you’re eating chocolate for breakfast any other day of the year apart from Easter Sunday then that’s just wrong. But on Easter Sunday, rules about chocolate go straight out the window in our household and it’s basically a competition of who can eat the most without bringing it back up.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spend 500 words trying to convince you why it’s acceptable to eat chocolate on a Sunday morning, but I am going to talk about that meal that is usually sandwiched between all of the chocolate, Easter dinner. If you’re from England (the south specifically) your knuckles may have turned white with fury because I’ve called it dinner and not lunch. But, that’s another story for another time. Let’s focus on the substance of that meal and not what it’s called.

Easter Morning Eats

Sunday 4th of April marks Easter Sunday this year, and like every year since being a child, I begin the day with a cup of tea and a selection of pastries and sweet treats. On special occasions such as these, our family likes to bring a little culture to the table with supermarket croissants and Pain au raisin. They are an insult to traditional French pastries, but what do our bland English pallets know? This is when the chocolate picking begins, from about 9am-12pm there will be an ongoing stream of hot drinks, complimented by a piece of chocolate egg, until it’s finally time to start cracking on with dinner.

Organising Cooking for Easter Dinner

As I’ve gotten older, the family has come to appreciate that I’m a better cook than my mum, which leaves me in charge of the roast. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I believe you don’t have to be a great, or even a good cook to make a decent Sunday dinner, you just need to be organised. In-order to perfect Easter dinner, I always do the following:

• Make a list of the ingredients needed before shopping
• Write down a timetable for the day
• Pre-chop/cut/peel the vegetables and leave them in water
• Have all of the herbs/spices I needed out on the side
• Clean as I cook
• ALWAYS leave the meat to rest whilst the rest of the food is cooking.

Over complicate things and that’s where it can all go wrong. Another thing to mention is to make sure that you have enough oven space. I know more than enough people that have planned a feast for the family, but had nowhere to cook it. And no, I will not be eating any microwave food for Easter dinner. Like Christmas, Easter dinner is a glorified Sunday roast, things just get a little difficult at the end when you’re trying to serve everything at once without letting anything get cold. This means the alarm bells go off and it’s a danger zone in the kitchen. Each family member is yelled at one by one to grab an almost too hot to handle plate of food to serve on the dining table.

And, you thought you couldn’t have chocolate soup for dessert. Try this recipe this Easter.

But, despite the elevated stress levels from cooking, and slight sick feeling in your stomach from consuming way too much chocolate, you sit, you eat and you enjoy. Something about a hearty meal full of meat, vegetables and a high pile of carbs manages to restore the sweet-salty balance going on inside and you no longer feel ill, but you will most certainly feel full by the end. But, never too full to leave space for dessert.