Food Network Star Aarti Sequeira on Her Easter Food Traditions, Her Husband’s Pancake Skills, and Why She’s on Team Lamb

Let’s just jump in here. What were your Easter traditions like growing up?

Easter was a really big deal in our house because the part of India that I’m from — a town called Mangalore on the Konkan coast — is Catholic. I think some people are surprised to learn that there is a large Catholic Christian community in India. It’s not as big as the Hindu or Muslim communities, obviously, but it’s been there for centuries.

This time of year is a big deal because we would observe Lent. We would give something up, we would go to all of the church services leading up to Easter Sunday: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday for sure. It was a big deal in our house and it’s a big deal in our community.

I remember that we didn’t do a lot of the candy. That was maybe something as I got older. I don’t remember doing a lot of Easter eggs and things like that. It was definitely a celebration that was about Jesus, not the Easter Bunny.

On Easter Sunday, we would wake up and we would have our Easter outfits. My Mum had bought us dresses — usually she’d buy them the summer before and we would hold onto them until Easter. And then we’d go to church. Fun fact, we’d NEVER say “Happy Easter” until after church! Even first thing in the morning. Nope. You gotta go to church first!

We would go to church and then we’d come home, and my mum would have a big Easter lunch planned and sometimes, I think more often my mum and dad more than us, would not have breakfast until we came home, so they were fasting before we took the Eucharist, and she would have a special breakfast. Sometimes it was smoked salmon, which was a big deal for us. So we would have that breakfast and then lunch would be something a little more traditional.

Lunch would either be some kind of roast, like roast lamb or chicken, or a pork dish, because where we’re from in India, we eat a lot of pork.

There is a traditional pork curry called sorpotel, which is a curry that’s made using lots of different parts of the pig. It would include a whole pork belly, the fat. And they would even put blood in the curry, too, to give it this sort of minerally, almost gently metallic flavor, because there’s so much iron in the blood. People aren’t doing that quite as much as they used to, but that was the traditional way of making it, so sometimes my mum would make sorpotel. If we didn’t do sorpotel or another pork curry, it would be some kind of roast, like a roast lamb, roast chicken. Usually roast lamb, though.

Get the recipe: Spicy Sticky Lamb Chops

Was that a leg of lamb?

Yeah, usually it was a leg of lamb. I will tell you honestly that pork curry happened more often, and you serve this pork curry with what’s called sannas, which are these steamed little rice cakes. They’re made from a fermented batter, and we would eat that with the curry. If she made lamb, she would do a leg of lamb and she would do what she called masala raan, which means leg. I think traditionally it would’ve been made with mutton or goat, but we would do lamb, and it would be marinated over a couple of days.

My mum would actually do two sets of marinades, because, especially if you were dealing with mutton, you needed one marinade just to tenderize the thing. The first marinade tended to be green papaya paste and salt, and you would just let that sit overnight. The next day, maybe in the morning, you would do the second marinade, which would be yogurt based — you’re really trying to get it tender — with a ton of different aromatic spices, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander.

My mum’s favorite is also caraway. She likes caraway and ginger and garlic, maybe a little bit of lemon juice and some Kashmiri chilies. They add a ton of color and just a little bit of heat, so you have this beautiful, bright red marinade, and then you slather that all over the meat and we roast it, and then she would do roast potatoes with that, too.

That would feel like a huge, very special feast, and something that we would only have once or twice a year. That lamb only came out for Easter or Christmas, so if we didn’t have it for Easter, it came out at Christmas. If we didn’t have it at Christmas, it came out at Easter. It was definitely something we look forward to all year.

That all sounds amazing. Can you walk me through a typical Easter Sunday for you these days?

Yeah. My husband and I have two little girls, eight and six, so there is now some expectation of some sort of chocolate Easter egg. It’s funny because there are things that they’re tying into Easter that we never did, specifically the candy portion of it. Especially Peeps. They’re just obsessed with Peeps. They hold onto them all year long until they’re stale and hard, and they still love them.

I usually create some sort of Easter basket for them with Peeps and chocolate eggs and bubbles and things like that, because I do want Easter to feel like a celebration for them, and we celebrate in lots of different ways: with food, with sweets, with cool activities and stuff like that.

It feels like the past few years I’ve been playing the piano at church on Easter Sunday, so usually I’m playing a couple of services and then we’ll come home. The nice thing about doing a leg of lamb is that, especially if you do a boneless leg of lamb or if you do these sticky spicy lamb chops (the recipe that I’m sharing with you guys) gosh, that takes no time whatsoever.

I can have it marinated, pull it out of the fridge. Ideally you kind of want to bring it to room temperature, but a lot of it is just hands-off cooking. That’s what Easter looks like to me: a nice, special lunch and then hanging out with the family, maybe going for a walk, maybe just lying out on the deck. A really sweet, chill time with either our little nuclear family or extended family here in North Carolina.

Nice. Do you have a breakfast routine before church these days?

Honestly, that would probably fall to my husband because I usually have to be at church really early. He’s the pancake maestro, so if there’s any request from my kids, it’s either his pancakes or his omelettes. They love those, so I just keep a wide berth and let him have his moment in the kitchen.

I’m sure that he makes them pancakes, and you will never find a plain pancake coming out of my husband’s kitchen. His pancakes are usually studded with fruit, Captain Crunch, little pieces of Kit Kat. He doesn’t put that stuff in the batter, he pushes it into the pancakes as they’re cooking, so each pancake is really heavy. And he loves French toast. That’s really his thing. He’s very snobby about it. Actually, we competed on Grocery Games together as a couple. We won, and one of the winning dishes was his French toast.

Wow. Those pancakes sound incredible. It’s nice that you can get a break from cooking on Easter morning. As you’re getting ready are you also getting the girls ready? Do they have special Easter outfits like you did as a kid?

I think these days we don’t focus on that stuff as much, especially because I’m raising girls and so I’m really careful about not putting too much emphasis on, “Your exterior appearance needs to be such and such in order for you to satisfy this barometer.”

If they want to wear a special dress on Easter then of course I’ll go out of my way to make sure that happens, but if it’s not something that they’re focusing on, I’m like, “Eh, it’s fine.” For us as a family, Easter is about the central premise of our faith and what we celebrate, and the fact that Jesus rose from the dead and why he did, so I really want them to understand that aspect of it, and then everything else is a bonus.

That sounds somewhat similar to how you were raised.

Yeah, it’s similar. But I don’t want it to be a somber affair, I want it to be something where it feels like joy because it is a joy.

Yeah. Are they allowed to say Happy Easter before church? Have you changed that rule?

Yes, we changed that rule. [Laughs]

But I still feel weird about it. If my husband wakes up in the morning, rolls over in bed, and says, “Happy Easter,” I’m like, “No. That’s nice. What a nice day.” [Laughs]

Speaking of Easter morning, what do your kids look forward to the most? It sounds like maybe the answer is Peeps.

Yes. They love the Easter egg hunt, and they love the Peeps. They are definitely sweet tooth kids so the candy aspect of it is huge for them, and I get it.

I do try to set the expectations a little bit lower, though. I know there are some moms whose love language is to create Easter baskets and do cool things for their kids, and that’s cool and that’s awesome, and there’s no shade coming their way from me about it. But I also want my kids to understand that Easter is awesome, but it’s not really about them. It’s about what someone did for them, so let’s come at it from that point of view.

I like to do little things, but I try to keep it pretty realistic for them in terms of, “This is what mama is able to do for you, and let’s celebrate that. Let’s celebrate the act of it rather than what the actual thing is.”

And what do you look forward to the most on Easter?

I always think that church services on Easter are so much more joyful. To me, the lights are brighter, the singing is more passionate, the smiles are wider. I just feel like the joy of the day is really palpable for me, so I love that aspect of Easter. I love the gathering with people, especially now that we live in North Carolina and have a ton more family here.

I love getting together on Easter and sharing food and just talking, and having a gathering that lasts a few hours. It’s a meal followed by sitting around maybe drinking coffee, maybe we go for a walk. To me, that’s what I look forward to when it comes to Easter.

Here in the States, it seems that most people are either Team Ham or Team Lamb on Easter. It seems to me that you’re on Team Lamb. Am I right about that?

The Christian part of me is team lamb 1000%, then the Indian part of me is like, “Well, right, but there weren’t that many lambs frolicking around the southwest coast of India, and so we are team pig over here.”

For me, lamb is probably the most appropriate protein on Easter Sunday. The theological connections, to me, are just too strong to ignore, so for me, it’s always, always lamb on Easter. Unless I’m back home with my family, and then pork makes sense from our particularly historical standpoint.

My dad comes from a farming background and grew up on the family farm, and he specifically was responsible for taking care of the pigs. They would raise a couple of pigs every year, so when it came close to Easter, he knew that it was time to say goodbye because they were going to be slaughtered, and it was really hard for him. He’d grown to love them.

Still, you hear him talk about pigs, he’s like, “They are so intelligent, they’re so communicative, they’re so grateful for every good thing that you do for them.” It was really hard. It was like saying goodbye to a friend for him, so for the first day, the first day that they would serve that curry, he wouldn’t eat it. But by the second day, he was like, “Okay, there’s not that much of it left.” Lucky for him, curry is always better the second day.

If I was back home in India or if my family was here, then definitely, I think we make that pork curry, but for me and living here now, it’s got to be lamb.

Lamb it is then! Speaking of, could you walk us through the lamb chop recipe you shared with us?

Sure. As with so many of my recipes, I stole it from my mama. [Laughs] I remember us being on holiday once. We had rented a house, we were staying in Lugano, which is on the border between Switzerland and Italy and is one of my dad’s favorite places.

My mum bought lamb and she made this recipe up, and one of the secret weapons of many an Indian cook that I don’t think they feel like they can tell you, is ketchup. It has that concentrated tomato-y flavor, a little bit of sweetness, ton of vinegar, and it does have some spices in there. I think just that texture of the ketchup is such a great thickener for any number of sauces or marinades. I remember she had made this marinade for these lamb chops using some ketchup and other things and I remember we loved it. I literally remember licking my fingers, licking the lamb bones, because it was so delicious. We all loved it. I had that really strong memory and I was like, “Okay, but can I recreate this without using ketchup?”

That’s definitely the inspiration for that dish, and I remember using the lamb loin chops as the protein because at the time we lived right next to Trader Joe’s and that was the only lamb chop that they carried, so I was like, “All right, I’ve never used this cut, but let me try it.” And it has become my favorite lamb chop because they’re just like little lamb T-bones, so they stay really juicy, they have a ton of great flavor, there’s no trimming required, and they’re pretty forgiving. I feel like they turn out perfectly cooked every time.

It’s similar to if you compare a chicken breast to a chicken thigh. It’s kind of hard to mess up a chicken thigh, and it’s the same thing here. A lamb loin chop, I think, just has a little more flexibility in it, whereas a lamb rib chop can go dry in a heartbeat.

Lamb loin chops are also great for people who are scared of cooking lamb. Cooking a leg of lamb feels very intimidating and very expensive. And lamb rib chops can also feel overwhelming because you don’t want to mess it up and then maybe you have to trim the chop or french it, which can feel like a lot. With lamb loin chops, you open up the package, you put some marinade on them and you put them in the oven. They’re pretty much good to go.

Do you have any lamb shopping or cooking tips?

Yeah, I think always check where the lamb is from, and then double check what the recipe is written for. What I mean by that is there’s typically three different places that lamb comes from: New Zealand, Australia, and America. The smallest of them comes from the smallest of those three countries, which would be New Zealand. It’s just the different species. In Australia, they’re sort of medium size, and then here in the States, we have a different species of lamb, that’s the way I understand it, and so everything’s just a little bit bigger.

Why do you need to pay attention to that? Because it means that your cook time is going to be different for each of them. Generally, I cook with Australian or New Zealand lamb. I think that they’re a little less fatty, so you know that gaminess that people sometimes are afraid of when it comes to lamb? To me, that comes more from the fat than it does from the meat itself, so I go in that direction.

That’s one thing to look for. The other thing is to make sure that, especially if you’re buying the loin chops, try to get ones that are around the same size. If you’re grabbing a package of them, really take a good look at them and make a note if any of them are smaller then the others because guess what? That one’s going to cook quicker.

Also, look for sales. Lamb freezes really well, so sometimes I will buy a lamb maybe three weeks ahead of time because there’s a really good sale. I have a leg of lamb in my freezer right now that I bought a couple of weeks ago because I was like, “This is an unbelievable price.” I double checked that it was fresh when it got to the grocery store, so that I could freeze it.

The last thing I would say is keep a meat thermometer handy. With a loin chop I don’t think you have to be quite as on top of it, but just know that there’s going to be a fair amount of carryover cooking because of the bone. There’s all that heat in the bone, so the meat is going to continue to cook a little while. Give it a good five or ten minutes to just rest after you pull it out of the oven because it’s going to keep cooking, and pull it out appropriately based on how you like your lamb, knowing that it’s probably going to go up another five degrees while it sits.

What would you typically serve with the chops?

When I was growing up, I remember one of my aunts would always make this really simple cucumber salad with lots of salt and lime, and it was so refreshing and so easy, and I would look forward to that so much. That’s become something that my girls know that if I pull out the cucumbers, they’re like, “Oh, are you going to make the cucumber salad?” I don’t do the salad just for them, but I just do cucumber, rice vinegar, salt, and a tiny, tiny, little bit of sugar just to balance out the vinegar. It’s actually pretty Asian, I think, in origin, but I think it’s fresh, it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s light, it’s crisp. It is a perfect counterpoint to this lamb, which has a ton of flavor and a ton of texture to it.

You need something light and bright, and I know a lot of people will do peas and fava beans and things like that. I think, because on Easter I’m usually coming home after playing at two services and stuff, I’m looking for simple and easy and crowd-pleaser things, and it’s cucumber salad to me. No one has ever said, “Ugh, can’t believe this salad with cucumbers.” Everyone’s excited about it, and it’s so, so easy. So easy to the point that now my eldest daughter is learning how to make it herself. It’s a really great backup singer to the lamb.

And I always do some kind of starch. I think with this, I would probably do some sort of roasted potato. I’ve been experimenting with other starchy vegetables, so it could also be roasted beets. I haven’t done roasted turnips yet, but every chef friend of mine is obsessed with turnips, though I’ve not been converted to the turnip yet.