Easter Dinner

A friend of mine and I decided that we wanted to try cooking Easter dinner together, as a practice run for when we have to cook Easter dinner for our future families.  The menu consisted of ham, cheesy potatoes (also known as funeral potatoes, which seemed the wrong name to use for Easter dinner) and homemade rolls.  We started with the ham because it was to cook the longest.  We had a bone-in shank ham weighing about 10 pounds, which is a lot of ham (the ham was free, we weren't in a position to complain).  I'd gotten a new roasting pan a few months ago and so we decided to cook the ham in my roasting pan, basting it with brown sugar and honey for the last 30 minutes of it's cooking time.  Needless to say, much to our surprise, the ham turned out really well.  Here's a picture:

Next were the rolls because they needed time to rise.  The recipe my friend had used lecithin, which was a first for me.  We used rapidrise yeast because that's what I had on hand and before we knew it, the dough had quadrupled in size!  Here's a picture:

At first we worried that we'd done something wrong but we decided to bake a batch and see how it went.  The rolls turned out well and tasted really good.  We brushed them with a little butter after they came out, to enhance the flavor:

The final step was to make the cheesy potatoes, which I love with ham.  Here's the final product (after cooking them twice as long as the recipe called for because my oven can't keep a steady temperature):

For this being my first Easter dinner without my mom's help, it turned out better than expected.  I learned some things long the way (be careful when using rapidrise yeast) but think that this is the start of a great Easter tradition.