I had lots of goals at the beginning of the year. Some were short-term projects and others were long-term resolutions. Several of the short-term projects are already complete. But the long-term resolutions quickly took a back seat. One of those was to blog more often and more currently. And here we are with Easter. A month later. Case in point.
Easter weekend was just a really nice, fun-filled family time. We had our annual crawfish boil on Good Friday. I still don't eat them.
This year the crawfish were the biggest I've ever seen.
The kids don't eat them either. But they do enjoy playing with them.
After lunch the kids dyed eggs with MawMaw, mainly so she could make deviled eggs with the dyed eggs.
Most of them were really pretty. But a couple of them ended up a bit on the grayscale because some children think they are color mixing scientists.
On Saturday we made crawfish bisque. This is something I've been hearing about for the past 17 years. Seth's MawMaw used to make it a lot, and it was one of his favorite dishes. His dad has been asking his mom to make it for about three years now, and it finally happened. It's a rather labor intensive meal, but there were lots of us in the kitchen, and we did it over a couple of days. The crawfish were boiled and peeled the first day, and the shells were soaked and cleaned really good. I should mention here that the shells are actually called "heads." But there's really nothing about this that looks like a head, even though I guess it's the head shell of the crawfish, so I'm going to stick with shells. The next day we used to crawfish meat to make a stuffing and then stuffed the shells with it. After the shells were stuffed, they were rolled in flour.
The stuffed shells were then browned in the skillet. After that, they were added to the big pot.
Crawfish bisque is eaten over rice, much like gumbo. It's as labor intensive to eat it as it is to make it because you have to scoop the stuffing out of each shell. And then you line your bowl with the empty shells to see who eats the most. Maybe that's a Bayham thing. I think it's safe to say Avery liked it!
And, believe it or not, I ate it. This was my bowl. (No, I didn't eat the claw meat. I just put those in there for the sake of the picture and then picked them out and gave them to Seth.)
And, just so you know, I ate it all. It wasn't crawfish-y at all, mainly because we rinsed and cleaned everything really well and didn't put crawfish in the gravy. There's a lot of seasoning in the stuffing, and the crawfish were ground up really fine so that masked the flavor, too. But I decided that four was all I could do. After that, I started tasting the crawfish, and I was done. I would certainly make it again because my people enjoyed it so much. I think I might would eat a little of it again.
And then we were up really early on Easter Sunday morning for the sonrise service.
Easter Sunday morning was also when Hannah Kate was baptized.
After church we ate lunch. Here's the kids' table. But do you notice what's wrong with the kids' table? (Besides the fact that Ellie is complaining about her shoes, and Mason is being a goofball as usual . . . and I just don't even know WHO he gets it from!) Avery is sitting over there at the adult table like a big dawg. Now, I know he's 17 years old, and I understand he will be a high school senior in just a matter of weeks. But, as far as I'm concerned, he will always be at the kids' table!
When we got home later that afternoon, we were all really tired from an early morning and a full weekend. It was a good kind of tired though. I'd prepared the kids' Easter baskets on Friday and already had them sitting out. I was expecting them to ask to "open" them (I mean, they were in plain sight the entire weekend!), but they never did! They didn't even really notice them. So that's what we did when we got home.
And that was our Easter! It was a really sweet time and, I think, one of my favorites! Over the years we've been really diligent to teach the children and help them to understand why we celebrate Easter. It's not about the bunny, the baskets, the hunts. It's about Jesus.
