Easter has been celebrated and over with for this year - probably for most of you.

Not for me though.

Actually Easter is April 27 for us. For years, my family only celebrated Greek Orthodox Easter, but when I had my children since only half of their ancestors were Greek, we started celebrating both of them. I loved it - a good excuse to get together for a delicious dinner but a really super chance to eat more chocolate, which was my very favorite snack growing up of course.

I had tons of it since I helped my dad make chocolate bunnies, etc. I became a little more careful of choosing it for a snack because you read so much about being cautious but then I read a health article a few months ago about how good chocolate is for you; you could probably hear me yelling hooray.

Two great articles in The Citizen last week. One was by Ashley Hanry, an editor at the paper, and one was by Carmelo Signorelli.

Ashley told about her month-long trip to India, and it was interesting to find out about things you didn't know. What was the most interesting to me was that there were similar traditions between India and Greece.

While growing up, every friend of my parents was called aunt or uncle by us children and now I learned that is the custom in India also. It was an automatic thing for us and today I still don't know which ones were really related to me.

The other tradition was about the big meal served at lunch time and the small one late at night. I wonder if more of these European countries have the same custom.

The other article was about ballroom dancing. I didn't know April was dance month. Dancing was very important in our family. My mom and aunts loved to dance and made sure my sister and I did. We both took dancing lessons from the age of 4 through high school. As a family, we went to every dance the Greek church held.

I love Greek dancing.

While we were in school, there were dances nearly every week before the high school games - the spirit events. They were called pep rallies.

Even better was during lunch-hour every day at school we ate lunch fast and then went to the gym to dance the rest of the hour. The teachers used to play records for us. Whoever started that had a great idea. It gave us a break from studying and a chance to get some exercise.

His article also named the places that adults could dance at on weekends. My friends and I were not able to go because we weren't old enough but eventually we were.

Then we went to The Albee, The Belvedere and Green Acres, which had great bands. Of course in the summer we were able to go to the Pavilion.

I think some of these traditions should be brought back, don't you?

I mentioned how our family loved dancing, but this to me is amazing. My Aunt Mickey, my mom's twin we have at home, was the best dancer of all of us. She is now 98 and has Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. She had a birthday last month, and when my cousin Pavlo came to help us celebrate it, he played the Bouzouki, a Greek musical instrument, for her. She kept tapping her feet to the beat of the music and twice tried to raise her arms up as if she was trying to dance Greek. Since she can hardly move her body and cannot walk because of the Parkinson's, it amazed us and brought tears to my eyes.

Well spring is working its way here. Enjoy it.

My ethnic recipe this week is Polish and is for noodles and cabbage. My other recipe is for banana chocolate cake.

Today's blooper

Today's blooper was done by a friend of my friend. It's about powdered sugar cookies, which she was making to serve as a dessert at a small dinner she was having for some friends. She unintentionally put the powered sugar in the flour canister.

She used the measurements for the flour required but of course since it was powdered sugar, they did not come out at all like sugar cookies. They were sweet but unedible. In fact, they fell apart in the oven and looked like burnt sugar.

Diana Sobus, of Auburn, specializes in making ethnic foods.

Noodles and Cabbage

Makes 6 to 8 servings

1/4 cup butter

1/2 cup chopped onion

4 cups chopped cabbage

1 teaspoon caraway seed

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1 8-ounce package egg noodles

1/2 cup sour cream

Melt butter in a large skillet, add onion and saute until soft. Add cabbage and saute five minutes. Stir in caraway seed, salt and pepper.

Cook noodles in salted boiling water; drain.

Stir noodles into cabbage and add sour cream. Cook five minutes longer, stirring frequently. Delicious served with kielbalsa.

Banana Chocolate Cake

2 9-inch layers

2 1/4 cups sifted cake flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2/3 cups shortening

1 1/2 cups sugar

2 eggs

2 ounces unsweetened chocolate melted

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup mashed, ripe bananas

1/2 cup buttermilk

Sift first four ingredients together.

Cream shortening with sugar.

Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Beat in chocolate and vanilla extract.

Add dry ingredients, alternating with banana and buttermilk, blending after each addition.

Pour into two ungreased 9-inch pans.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.