"Easter" news and stories

One of the year's most festive meals features the same components that make up perhaps the most standard plate in the American repertoire: eggs, bread and pork – commonly recognized as the nation's breakfast triumvirate – are the defining ingredients of Easter celebrations the world over.

Of course, few holiday observers plan to serve up scrambled eggs, bacon and toast on Easter Sunday: Diners will instead indulge in stout pink hams, hot cross buns, sweet yeast cakes, currant biscuits, cream-filled chocolate eggs, smoked kielbasas and gaudily decorated hard boiled eggs, paying homage to traditions forged in medieval Europe. While Americans have modified many of their inherited menus, the essential elements have changed little since the first Christians devised their holiday meals.

It's Easter time and for lots of people that means roasted leg of lamb, fresh asparagus and Easter eggs. It also means Peeps season! You know, those pastel colored, sugar encrusted marshmallow bunnies and chicks that make even the most dedicated Debbie Downer grin. Apparently there are a lot of Peeps devotees. According to the company's website, marshmallowpeeps.com, "the amount of Peeps chicks and bunnies consumed at Easter could more than circle the earth's circumference." (We're guessing that's a whole lot o' Peeps).

And visiting the Washington Post Peeps Competition website it seems that Peeps aficionados also have way too much time on their hands. The Fourth annual "Peeps Show" competition drew more than 11 hundred submissions. Contestants were asked to create a diorama of "a famous occurrence or scene." The one ironclad rule: The characters depicted in the diorama must be represented by, you guessed it, Peeps.

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• This sugary legume is smarter than you.
• Is hopping chocolate your thing?
• Hold the mint jelly on this navarin of lamb.
• An Easter menu including mustard ham, asparagus and creme fraiche is one that we can get behind.
• Manage the in-laws with pink torpedoes or one of these cocktails.
• After a harsh winter, the White House garden rises again and is expanding.
• You've been visiting wineries all wrong.

• Still tweaking your Easter Sunday menu? The Times offers up its recipe archives.
• "People don't just throw away an entire food culture after centuries." But with Irish cooking, they came pretty close.
• Which one's greener: the field tomato shipped from Mexico, or the greenhouse one grown in-state? We know which one is redder...
• At Recette in the West Village, hyperboles abound. (How often is head cheese compared to Johnny Depp?)
• Last time, 20 bottles of Loire wines; this time, 20 bottles of Riojas. Life is tough for wine panelists.

While it's not quite as whimsical as chocolate bunnies or colored eggs, "basket cheese" -- a mild cheese that tastes like a combination of ricotta, pressed cottage cheese and very fresh mozzarella -- is a sought-after Easter food among Italian families. The mild cheese is traditionally sliced and eaten with bread, jam or honey for breakfast, or nibbled as an afternoon snack with olive oil, salt and pepper.

"It's really the simplest cheese someone could make," says Louella Hill, cheesemaker at Narragansett Creamery in Providence, R.I., which has been producing hundreds of baskets of cheese for the Easter holiday for the Boston, Providence and New Haven markets. "It's fresh milk, gently coagulated with rennet and placed into baskets to provide the traditional shape. It's meant to be the first flush of milk with the first flush of green grass, and has a very short shelf life -- a few weeks at most."

It's also the traditional cheese of Italian Easter pies, of which there are many variations: Pizza Piena, Pizza Chena, Pastiera Napoletana or Pizza Rustica.