Ham and Egg Combo

This recipe is a great use for all your Easter Dinner leftovers. It includes ham, cheese (Mom always had cheese on hand for ham and cheese sandwiches), and hard boiled eggs. Being Easter, our family had always dyed a number of hard-boiled eggs, so this dish was always a little more colorful than expected. Eating hard-boiled eggs that have had some coloring bleed into the egg itself is perfectly safe, but perhaps a little disconcerting.

This meal is easy to assemble after Easter because the main ingredients are all leftovers. This meal is also very easy to make, especially on a busy weekday night.

For me, I particularly enjoy the English muffins served with this dish. There is just something unique about English muffins. With this dish, the English muffin is both an edible plate and also used to wipe the real plate clean.

Ham and Egg Combo

• Ham, cubed
• 1/2 cup mayo
• 1/4 cup flour
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 cups milk
• 1/4 pound cheese
• 1/4 cup minced dried onions
• 1 1/2 cup cubed ham
• 4-6 hard-boiled eggs, cubed
• English muffins

Blend mayo, flour, salt and pepper in a sauce pan on low heat. Gradually add and blend up to 2 cups of milk. Add cheese and onion. Heat until cheese melts and is well-blended. Add in ham and eggs. Heat thoroughly. Serve over toasted English muffins. Enjoy!

Party Punch

Having a party? I recommend serving Party Punch, especially if there will be a lot of kids. The best part of this punch is just after the sherbet is added, the ice cream melts and becomes foamy, as you can see in this photo. When serving myself, I am sure to get mostly sherbet.

John and Laura brought the ingredients and made this Party Punch for our Easter dinner party. They had remembered this punch from years ago, but it had not made a recent appearance at family parties. I am grateful to John and Laura for recalling this punch and bringing it to the party.

This particular punch was a big hit with the young kids. After drinking some punch, all the kids were running around like they were crazy. But now that I think about it, that is how they usually are, so maybe this tasty punch had nothing to do with their energy. Still, this party punch will have to make a regular appearance at family parties again. MDS's only complaint about this punch was that he did not get enough. He should know the Buckley way by now--once food is available, it is every man for himself. Next time, MDS will have to push past the kids to get to the punch bowl first.

Party Punch

• 2 liter bottle Hawaiian Punch
• 2 liter bottle Ginger Ale
• Frozen Sherbet (orange or rainbow)

In a large punch bowl, mix the Hawaiian Punch and Ginger Ale. Add sherbet and mix gently. Enjoy!

Eggs Newport

Eggs Newport is a classic Easter dish, and something that Mom only made on Easter. The primary reason for this dish's annual Easter appearance is its use of hard-boiled eggs. Just before Easter, we would dye Easter eggs all sorts of fun colors. We would then have an Easter Egg hunt on Easter morning. One year, an egg was not found for months (or so the story goes) until the smell got so bad. I would suggest counting eggs before and after an Easter Egg hunt.

Every year, there were always so many eggs, that Mom had to be creative to use them all. So there were many Easter dishes that featured hard-boiled eggs, and as you can see here, colorful hard-boiled eggs when the dye leaked into the eggs. Easter dinner always featured potato salad and Eggs Newport with these colorful eggs.

Eggs Newport produces mixed results from the family. Some love the once-a-year appearance of this Easter delicacy. Others look at Eggs Newport with a distrusting eye toward something that only appears once a year and never made it into Mom's regular rotation. Whether you love or hate Eggs Newport, it is one of Mom's Easter classics.

This year, MDS and I hosted Easter. We loved having everyone over and were grateful that the weather was so nice that everyone could enjoy being outside. Some of our guests even took a walk to Wrigley Field to check out the Cubbies. They won.

Because Easter dinner would not be complete without Eggs Newport, we asked Mom to make it here with us. Megan and Jenny were also on hand to assist. To be honest, this might be the first recipe posted on this blog for which I played no real role in actually preparing.

Eggs Newport

• 6 to 8 hard-boiled eggs
• 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 cup milk
• pepper (to taste)
• 1 Tbsp. dried minced onion

In a bowl, blend condensed soup with mayonnaise. Gradually add milk; stir until well blended. Add in pepper and dried minced onion.  Slice the hard-boiled eggs.

In a one-quart baking dish, layer the sauce with the eggs in several layers, finishing with the sauce. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes. Enjoy!