Secret recipe

It’s always been my belief that you can consider yourself a pretty good cook when you can make something without bothering much with the recipe. By my own standard, I’m a great cook. As we’re all friends here, I’ll share my secret with you. Put plenty of things you know/hope/believe should go in a particular dish and you’ll get something that vaguely resembles whatever you wanted to make.
This goes for everything, really. Originally, this was my secret recipe for soup. Round up everything that looks like vegetables or at least looks like it might go into a pot, throw everything into the water and boil. Sometimes you might have plenty of carrots lying around, but no celery. Well, doesn’t matter. Same goes for all the green stuff, like dill or parsley or whatever. A few leftover salad leaves, into the pot with them and you can call it salad borscht. See how easy it is?

The reason I’m writing this is that today I had to come up with something Eastery.
I’m in a very foul mood and the last thing on my mind is celebrating Easter. Yet, being baptized in the Catholic church it’s sort of expected from me. As I see it, explaining to the few people that actually care why I don’t care to celebrate it’s quite time consuming and too much of a hassle, so my secret recipe to avoid all that trouble is to come to a sort of a compromise. Make it look like we’re celebrating… which, at least in this part of the world, has more to do with cooking traditional Easter food (and plenty of it) and less with anything church related. If you can say you have Easter food, nobody’s going to ask about going to Mass.
The traditional painted eggs were a disaster. Shells cracked, sickly looking colors and I’m not even sure they’re properly hard-boiled. We only made just a few so that’s not going to be a problem.
Also, making some dessert seemed like a must and it really doesn’t take much to convince me to make something sweet. Several options were considered and properly discarded, until I’ve settled on something similar to the traditional cheese dessert people in this part of the world call ‘pasca’. Basically, a form of cheesecake, only with dough instead of biscuits. That’s were my talents as a cook were required. Using the above mentioned secret recipe I made some sort of sponge cake batter with plenty of cocoa, because in this house we believe in chocolate above anything else. As for the cheesy part, again, throw in some eggs, plenty of cocoa and some extra chocolate flakes and that’s about it.
I won’t post a picture of said cheesecake as it’s still in the oven, but it looks festive enough and it’s got chocolate, what more can you ask for?
I’m pretty much set for this week’s Easter. Unfortunately, most people in this country are Eastern Orthodox and celebrate Easter next week. As my mother celebrates next week I’ll be expected to come up with some other Eastery dish and I have no idea what that might be… wish me luck!
In the meantime, have a Happy Easter in case you celebrate and a pleasant Sunday if you don’t…