School vacation starts this weekend, and we'll be venturing out of mud-slogged Harmony to spend a few days by the sea. So if you don't hear from me for a few days, assume that I have no Internet connection or that I'm standing on the top of a cold mountain staring out into choppy Penobscot Bay or that I'm trying to cook Easter dinner in a microwave.

Probably I am one of the very few Americans who has never owned a microwave and doesn't know how to use one. To deal with this problem, I am pre-making Easter dinner today, and will let some other person at the party deal with the microwaving.

Here's the menu:

* Two square pans of pre-baked vegetable lasagna that will fit nicely into a teeny-tiny cottage refrigerator. If Tom is not too exhausted after work tonight, he will make the noodle dough. In the meantime, I'll make fresh sauce, mix the filling, prepare the vegetables (zucchini? spinach? mushrooms?), and then we'll stay up late and listen to baseball and drink coffee and put it all together.

* Sourdough baguettes. Presently my kitchen counter is covered with bowls of proofing dough, and already I am wondering how I will possibly manage to get everything baked.

* Baby lettuce salad, unfortunately store-bought because my garden is nothing but snow and snow and snow.

* Chocolate-orange mousse, easy to whip up, easy to transport, easy to fit into a teeny-tiny cottage refrigerator. What I'd really like is lime meringue pie, but that's not practical as road food.

* A double batch of shortbread cookies. Too many cookies is always the right amount when one is hiking with a 16-year-old boy.