Sunday dinner: Easter edition! We don’t actually celebrate Easter, but I’d never baked a ham before, so I figured it was as good an excuse as any to try.

1. Marmalade Glazed Ham
The darn orange slices refused to stay on the hunk of ham, and the glaze seemed to mostly run off and burn onto the baking pan—thank goodness for aluminum foil. I also realized that I prefer ham better cold than straight out of the oven. We had a ton of it left over, despite trying to pick the smallest ham in the store. I ended up chopping a good portion of it—as well as the leftover potato and onion from the side dishes—into a salad Olivier for lunch the next day.

2. Tomato-Onion Casserole (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Tasty, roasted veggies that worked quite well. Next time, I would shove a bit more slices into the dish; I didn’t anticipate them shrinking quite as much as they did.

3. Scalloped Potatoes with Leeks
First, I halved the recipe to avoid massive leftovers taking over the fridge. Then, I nearly screwed it up because I thought it only needed to be baked for 30 minutes. I originally figured I’d just bake the potatoes while the ham is resting… and then I saw it needed to bake an additional 45 minutes. Whoops. Since the oven was otherwise occupied by the ham, I tried to cook the gratin in the broiler (ours is a compartment just under the oven that gets to about the same temperature) at the same time. It sort of worked, but the bottom layer of potatoes was slightly undercooked and the liquid didn’t absorb/thicken as much as it should have on account of the dish being heated mostly from the top. Note to self: read recipes more carefully next time.

4. Cranberry-Orange Sparkler (Everyday Food, May 2011)
Yummmmmmmm is all I have to say about this. You really can’t go wrong with cranberry juice, orange liqueur, sparkling wine, and ginger ale.

5. Raspberry Mousse Pie (Everyday Food, May 2011)
This quickly turned into a strawberry mousse pie when I saw that raspberries were something like $6 a pint, and I needed a pound and a half. o_O The strawberries, however, were 3 pounds for $5 and substituted beautifully. This mousse was soooo good, though slightly heavier than it should be, since I may have over-beaten the whipped cream a tad. Sadly, it uses gelatin, so it isn’t suitable for vegetarians. But if that’s not a consideration, this recipe would work super well as filling between layers of chiffon cake.