Christmas with yours, Easter with whomever you want. Here are some ideas for sharing a day outdoors, in the countryside or simply in a park in your city. Because you don't need to travel far to celebrate Easter Monday – and you don't even need to know how to cook.
All you need
A picnic can be a real relaxation, or become a kind of move: the choice is yours. We advise you to start light with a blanket and a well-stocked basket, but a clever menu. When organizing a picnic it is better not to get caught up in the enthusiasm and concentrate on practicality (especially if you already know that you will end up organizing everything yourself): you may not need practically anything beyond food.
A platter of cold cuts accompanied by a good bread is perfect, it is country, chic, but not binding. Bread and salami all agree, and all you need is a nice cutting board to serve them. Less is more, as long as the quality is excellent, like that of a bread with sourdough and a Felino PGI salami like that of Antica Ardenga, made with pig meat born and grown on the farm with GMO free feeding, stuffed only in natural gut with spices and wine red.
Casatiello and crescia, as tradition has it
At Easter all over central Italy a real specialty is served, a bread rich in cheese. Crescia, Umbrian cake, Easter cake, cheese cake … with the necessary differences it is more or less a savory panettone, rich in eggs, pecorino and Parmesan, to be served with cold cuts. Finding it in the big cities is not easy, but at Eataly they bake it at the Bakery for the Easter period.
Ditto for the Neapolitan casatiello, a very good lard-based bread dough, rich in salami and cheese, black pepper and eggs. For a picnic on Easter Monday, he alone would be enough to feed a regiment, it is beautiful to serve, comfortable to eat. But doing it is long and laborious, requires more than an hour of leavening and slow cooking in the oven for an hour and a half. Buying it ready is the easiest choice, and above all if it has to be offered, with the guaranteed result. You can find the one at Eataly at the Bakery throughout the month of April.
Bubbles in red
For a picnic to be a successful event you need good wine. It must be fresh, light and suitable to be uncorked at lunch, on a barefoot lawn. Lambrusco is the right wine, undervalued for years and rediscovered in recent times, capable of giving a great experience also to connoisseurs. There are winemakers who are raising the good name of this Italian wine with excellent products at an excellent quality / price ratio – the solution to celebrate without spending a fortune. No plastic glasses, however, spoil wine and atmosphere. The master's touch is to have low glass goblets or glasses with you, which for Lambrusco are still very good for making you cheers!
The time-saving kit
Little time and few ideas? Cold cuts and focaccia are for you, and to enrich flavors, a couple of preserves to spread on bread. Here is the basis of the Eataly picnic kit, to which are added three bottles of wine, to celebrate: a red to drink fresh, like the Pinot Nero by Kaltern Caldaro, a trendy bottle of Etna bianco DOC from Tenuta di Fessina and a Ribolla Yellow Friuli Colli Orientali of Le Vigne di Zamò. The kit arrives directly at home with your home delivery of Eataly Today (active service in the cities of Milan, Turin and Rome) … and you're done!
The dessert is easy
And as sweet, very easy, a dove. Classic by Tommaso Muzzi, to please everyone, made only with sourdough, candied fruit obtained from fresh Sicilian and Calabrian citrus peel, cream butter, essential oils and vanilla from Madagascar. But as for the panettone, there are many creative versions of dove chocolate like the white chocolate and pistachio from Vincente, a female pastry shop in Bronte, Sicily, home of Pistachio Dop.
