Easter Buffet

We're doing the Easter meal as a buffet.  We bought a triple dish warmer at Target and that will make it possible to keep the hot things hot without running back and forth from the kitchen and the oven. 

This is the traditional dish here.  It comes from a cousin's mother-in-law and that was some years ago!  It goes well with a ham and is less trouble to eat than if you'd covered the ham with rings of sliced pineapple. 

JEAN CLARK'S PINEAPPLE DRESSING
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
4 eggs (2 eggs works just as well)
5 slices of white sandwich bread
allspice and nutmeg to your taste
1 can 20 oz. crushed pineapple

Cube the bread and set it aside.  Cream the butter and sugar together.  Beat in one egg at a time, add the seasonings.  Add the can of crushed pineapple - juice and all.  Mix well, letting it "steep" so to speak and then bake at 350 for an hour.  It will puff up and turn a golden brown.

This meal is heavy on the sweet side - the honey-glazed ham, the pineapple dressing so I wanted a dessert that while easily as rich was perceived as "light, palate clearing."  Thus Key Lime Pie.  I got this recipe at the Dockside restaurant, Savannah, GA.  They'd had so many requests for it, they'd printed it out on 3x5 file cards!

1 store-bought graham-cracker crust pie shell.
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup bottled lime juice
1 14-oz. can condensed sweetened milk

Unwrap the pie crust and put it in the oven for 10 min.. at 325.
Mix the egg yolks, lime juice and canned milk together
Pour mixture into pie shell and bake about 15 min. at 325

Richie couldn't resist a  package of Peeps so when this pie has cooled down, I'm going to cut it into wedges and put a bright yellow Peep at the crust's edge of each serving.  Should at least get a laugh!

Unfortunately we won't be able to have the chicken races down the center of the cleared table as Richie only found one of them.  They're wind-up white chickens who lay "eggs" (reusable jelly beans - you don't want to eat one considering where it came from and the floors they've fallen onto)  as they walk.   

HAPPY EASTER TO YOU ALL!