So it's the day after Easter. You visit the grocery for a couple of things, and if you're me, you come home with a spiral cut brown sugar ham (77 cents a pound, and then half off on top of that) and a bag of Hershey's special dark chocolate eggs (75% off) .

Maybe you didn't go to the grocery on Easter Monday. Maybe you had the ham already. Maybe your family had a ham for Easter dinner.  (Our family had lamb and Ardee's roasted root vegetables - thank you Ardee! Your recipe has become a staple at our house now - and an herb salad with goat cheese.) But a lot of people traditionally eat ham for Easter. And then their families eat ham sandwiches for the next two weeks until the ham smells slightly odd and they can't even stand to think of ham so they chuck it.

 Maybe you bought chocolate eggs to hide for your children and somehow, just by ACCIDENT, you bought a whole extra bag more than you have children and now you are looking at it mournfully and shaking your head and thinking, "Somebody's got to eat all that chocolate so it doesn't go to waste - Oh, the sacrifices I make!"

Yeah.

Anyway. If you have any of these problems, I have a couple of solutions for you.

World's Easiest Easter Monday Ham Soup

1 meaty ham bone from a brown sugar glazed ham

1 large tomato, diced

1 large yellow onion, peeled and chopped

1 cup red lentils

1 small red hot V8 (or tomato juice plus hot sauce to taste)

about a cup carrots (I cheated and used baby carrots out of a bag that were getting old - otherwise chop coarsely)

2 sticks celery, chopped

3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced 

1 32 oz box Kitchen Basics no salt chicken stock, or other chicken stock (I love this stuff!  Cheap and no added salt - very handy.)

1/3 bunch fresh Italian parsley, coarsely ch0pped

2 teaspoons lime juice, fresh if you happen to have limes but don't sweat it.

 Dried cilantro, oregano, marjoram, thyme, rosemary, sage - I never measure herbs, just chuck them in until it seems right. I used a whole lot of cilantro, less of the others.

Salt and pepper to taste.

 First  remove the spiral cut part of the meat from your ham and put it away for later. I froze half of ours, and kept half for sandwiches, but then, there are only two of us and a whole ham is a lot of meat to go through.

Next cut as much of the remaining meat off your ham bone as you can easily get to. I ended up with at least a cup of meat. Toss everything - meat, bone, lentils, veggies, v8, stock, and herbs - in a good sized pot. You want the liquid to cover the bone. If it doesn't, add stuff until it does.

Bring to just under a boil - you don't want this boiling hard because it will make the herbs bitter. Then reduce to a slow simmer.  Simmer 45 minutes. Remove from heat. Take the bone out and put it on a plate. Let cool for 10 minutes. (Watch your pets!) Then remove more of the meat from the bone - it should come off easier now. Strain your soup liquids into a bowl and put the solids on a plate with the meat. Chop all the solids into a more or less uniform size. Return the solids to the liquids.

This smells so delicious when freshly cooked that you should treat yourself to a bowl. If you're watching your weight, put the rest in the fridge overnight, then remove the fat which has come to the top.

If your ham is a salty kind instead of brown sugar glazed, add cubed sweet potatoes and sliced apples to the recipe. The potatoes will soak up the salt and the apple will add sweetness.

Easter Egg Smoothie

 5 Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate Easter eggs

1 cup yogurt (I use non fat)

1 /2 cup frozen raspberries

1/2 cup frozen strawberries

2 tablespoons roasted walnut flour (see below)

To make walnut flour, place walnuts in a single layer on a microwave safe plate and nuke them until they taste and smell toasted - in our microwave  this takes about a minute and a half. Then put them in a plastic bag and crush with the bottom of a bottle (or use a mortar and pestle) until they are the consistency of flour. 

Coarsely chop the chocolate eggs with a serrated knife. 

Put everything in a blender and go!

One note - I'm usually pretty indifferent to whether or not produce is organic, but according to what I've read, there are more pesticides used per portion of raspberries than any other produce. So, if you're going to care, raspberries might be a good thing to care about. At my store organic frozen raspberries are only a dollar a bag more than convential ones, and it's worth it to me.

This smoothie is crammed full of good stuff - a great excuse to throw around vocabulary words like Omega-3's, MUFAs , flavonoids, antioxidants, polyphenols, anthocynanins, and epicatechins. Not only do you get to eat your Easter loot, you can do it without guilt, and show off a little, too!