Spring feasts for the Easter weekend

Through the first cold months of the New Year, Easter is a beacon on the horizon, bank holidays sandwiching a weekend that promises days which will be brighter and longer and more verdant. I’ve felt a longing for it this year more than any before; the January rain was relentless, the February skies were oppressively grey. But Easter is almost here, the clocks went forward this morning, and it’s finally spring.

I grew up Catholic, taking seriously my role as Pontius Pilate at Easter Sunday Mass. But in my family now there are no specific rituals attached to Easter – no anticipated shape, no two Easter weekends that ever look entirely alike. Perhaps it’s the untethered nature of the date, the vague late March to late April of it all, the way people always seem surprised when it arrives, that ensures the expectations attached are more fluid, too. Easter has become a festival of feasting that suits my sensibility – the longest long weekend of the year spacious enough to allow for lazy mornings at home alone, as well as dedicated time with people I love.

It’s a perfect weekend for lingering over planning and cooking and eating, for making elaborate meals simply for the pleasure of doing so. Despite the hungry gap – that period we find ourselves in once the winter crops have bolted and before the earliest summer harvests are ready – it’s a joy to cook at Easter. It’s a time of optimism, of anticipating abundance, a season of rebirth and new growth, and patience rewarded as the world comes back to life. I’m a person who loves to be in the kitchen – alone or alongside my most beloved people – and at Easter I make time for it, for delighting in something new to enjoy.

The recipes that follow are exactly what I want to be eating for the long weekend: a rösti just for me, for a late-morning brunch on Friday; baked cheese and baked apples one quiet evening on the sofa; a salsa verde and roast lamb feast for Sunday lunch with the family; and a skordalia to be employed in many guises, including alongside the lamb. It’s a farewell to the darkest days of the year. Whether it’s warm or not, it’s a weekend (and a menu), that makes me want to fling the windows open.