ХРИСТОС ВОСКРЕСЕ!

Pascha is here again.  We celebrated as we always do - with lots of church during Holy Week, the baking of kulich, dyeing of eggs, taking the kids to church at midnight, Easter baskets and our annual Pascha party.  I did not do a great job of getting photos of most of these events this year, but here is what I have.

Cooling kulich in "vintage" coffee cans and new Moscow-purchased specialty pans.

Bleary-eyed kiddos getting ready to head to church at midnight.

Breaking the fast with kulich, paskha, prosciutto and cheese after church.

Morning Easter baskets.

XB!

Eggs were dyed with yellow onion skins, collected since September and stored in the freezer.

The mantel was decorated.

Easter baskets were filled.

At midnight, bells were rung and candles were lit.

Baskets were discovered.

Pictures were taken.

Eggs were hunted.

The fast was broken.

  XPUCTOC BOCKPECE!

XPUCTOC BOCKPECE

Christ is Risen, translated into Russian, is one of those cool words that you can write in Russian while using the English alphabet.  Good thing, because I don't know how to type in Russian.

Anyway, He has risen and we celebrated.  We went to the midnight service at the church near the Embassy again.  Poor Zoia did not enjoy the joyous shouting of "XPUCTOC BOCKPECE" (Christ is Risen) and "BOUCTUNY BOCKPRECE" (Truly He is Risen!).  She tried her hardest not to cry, but it was too loud for her little ears.

The next morning the girls excavated their Easter baskets and we hosted a large party.  It was nearly 60 degrees and everyone hung out outside.  Like I said, Pascha always brings in the spring.

Also, I made a few decorations:

Paint chips!  Thank you Pinterest.

Could it be?

Why yes ... I think it is.  Spring is here.  It's kind of stubbornly dragging its feet as most days do start out in the high 20s or low 302, but the only precipitation we've had in the last five days has been rain.  And the snow is melting.  And I even see a couple of buds peeking up through the soil where the landscapers have begun beautifying the Embassy compound.  AND it's supposed to be in the 60s on Sunday!  Pascha always seems to bring in the spring.

It's not quite warm enough to just wear our raincoats (even if they are lined with fleece), but the down jackets are starting to feel slightly overkill-ish. 

Palm Sunday and some eggs

Though most of you probably celebrated Easter yesterday, we've got another week to go.  So we spent the weekend dyeing Easter eggs and marking Palm Sunday.  We cut out all artificial colors and flavors from our diet not long ago, and thus, we decided to make our own natural dyes for the eggs this year. We dyed brown eggs, white eggs, and a carton's worth of quail eggs that I picked up on impulse at the supermarket last weekend.  For our natural dyes, we tried: red cabbage, beets, red onion skins, red wine, turmeric, and simmered spinach.

Natasha and Zoia helped fill the pots with the natural dye stuffs.

Zoia didn't quite understand what was going on; she thought we were making soup.

Natasha enjoyed a rare opportunity to stand at the stove.  Just looking at this photograph makes me nervous.

Zoia also wanted to dip eggs in the dye.  Here she is dipping a brown egg into a bowl of hot beet juice. 

Here's Natasha, dipping some raw white eggs into a pot of onion-skin-dyed water.  We tried two methods - immersing already cooked eggs into hot dye, and boiling raw eggs along with the dye stuff.  I had red that the boiling method worked better, but I messed up my experiment by only boiling brown eggs ahead of time, so the only eggs that boiled along with the dyestuff were the white ones.  Kind of hard to compare.

Here's a cool trick.  So, when you boil red cabbage, it turns the water a lovely Smurfy blue (the jar on the left).  But if you add a glug of vinegar, the cabbage juice instantly turns bright fuschia (the jar on the right).  I didn't try to dye any eggs in the fuschia (another experimental fail; I didn't plan ahead at all!), but the blue dye actually took quite nicely.

After we'd immersed all our eggs, we had dinner and Z entertained us with tricks.

Then we checked on our eggs.   I only put quail eggs in my red wine.  The wine did dye the outside of the eggshell a deep brown, but it also actually ate away at the outer, brown speckly part completely.

This is what a red-wine-dyed quail egg looks like when you remove the brown peel.  That is still shell there - just the inner layer of the shell.

And here is the finished product.  The quail eggs took the dye the best.  The brown ones on the edges were dyed in the onion skins.  The yellow ones in the middle were dyed in turmeric.  The blues were all cabbage juice, although I think a couple of them were in the beet juice first (which did nothing).  The funky white-and-black ones are red wine.  

These are all onion skin and cabbage.  The chicken eggs that hung out in the beet juice and the turrmeric water, and the spinach juice, didn't take on much color at all, so I overdyed them all in the red onion mixture.  I think next year we will have far more red onion peels, and we'll leave the eggs in that mixture and in the cabbage juice longer.

Palm Sunday morning.  Again - it is still quite cold here - 30ish on Sunday.  I was just an irresponsible mom and let them hang out outside to get these pictures of them in their green dresses.

Lovely

Yesterday was lovely. The weather was sunny and beautiful, and we spent most of our time outside.

And bonus, Jeremy's birthday cake did not fall apart. I have much work to do on making cakes look appetizing, however, I have the taste part down pat! The bottom tier was vanilla bean white cake (my favorite) with raspberry filling made from berries I froze last summer. The top layer was devil's food with raspberry filling. And the frosting was a whipped milk chocolate ganache. Absolutely delicious, but I learned that I can't be so pokey about frosting the cake when working with ganache, or it will harden before you've smoothed it out and end up looking like this:



The spread. We had two hams - a Russian-bought one that was pretty tasty, and a country ham from Virginia. I wish I'd gotten a picture of them in the roasters!  Also - sliced sausage, four types of cheese, and a plate of greens, baguette rounds, rye bread, Armenian lavash, a savory smoked salmon cheesecake, a summery salad, roasted summer squash, roasted eggplant, cheesy potatoes (recipe here), kulich, pascha, and of course, birthday cake.


Dessert ... yum. You can see the cake in the foreground.

Times like this I wish we had a hose out back ...

XPUCTOC BOCKPECE!

Or, "Christos Voskrese," which means "Christ is Risen!"  This is how we greet each other on Pascha and for the 39 days thereafter.  The proper response is ""Voistinu Voskrese," or "Truly He is Risen!"

We got the babies up for the midnight procession last night.  Poor Zoia wasn't very happy, so we did not stay for the rest of the service.  And she did not make the rest of the night easy for us.

There were a LOT of people.

Then we came home and broke the fast.  Natasha enjoyed the Italian prosciutto and cappicola most of all.  Her Herbst relatives will be very proud.

This morning we took some Easter photos.

 

In about 1.5 hours, we will host more than 30 people for an Easter celebration.  Pictures to come tomorrow!

Great Silence

In Eastern Orthodoxy, the day before Pascha is known as "The Day of Great Silence."

Well, you do the best you can.  This morning we took the kids to church, and then Jeremy took Natasha to an Easter egg hunt while Zoia and I walked to the store in the glorious sunshine (is spring finally here??) to buy last-minute groceries and some flowers.   Natasha had no trouble figuring out what she was supposed to do - the only difficulty was in keeping her from getting all the eggs before anyone else had a chance.

Tonight we will get the kids up and head to the midnight service at the church located conveniently across the street.  Then we'll come home and break the Lenten fast with some kulich, paska, meat and cheese.  (From this stash, which came home from the grocery store with me last weekend ... plus some more meat and cheese I bought today at the store, and a 9-pound ham that is sitting in the fridge).

I used half the cream cheese to make the paskha (a yummy, yummy cheesecake-like spread), which is currently in the fridge looking like this:

I made Jeremy dye some eggs to get him in the mood.  I know, he doesn't look that enthused.  I don't get it.

Then tomorrow afternoon, we will have friends over to celebrate Pascha and Jeremy's birthday.  This is what the table looks like so far.  Now I have to stop procrastinating and get back in the kitchen!