Yesterday we passed a milestone of cookie season. All the leftover cookies have been transferred into smaller containers and they’re in the fridges.
Washed out cookie buckets
I also finished grading yesterday afternoon, although I did have to go back in and change a bunch of grades this morning because I forgot to add points for a lurking assignment, so a handful of students had to have their grade go up a notch.
So now I am officially on winter break, Yay! I had cookies for breakfast.
Susan came over to pick up her cookie boxes, and we drove to Colectivo where, as a holiday indulgence, we split one of their breakfast sandwiches, although they had to make it with bacon since they were out of sausage. Their whole pastry case was bare – their truck couldn’t get here from Milwaukee in the blizzard conditions today. I braved them to walk home and it really wasn’t too bad. I bundled up, thin wool gloves under the big Bernie mittens that Mark gave everyone last year for Christmas, fleece with a hood under my warmest coat, wool cami base layer under everything else and a big shawl scarf on top. Plus it’s only a little over a mile.
So how did the party go? It was nice. It seemed a bit small, and ended a bit early but that was all OK. I tried to be conservative with the food; not make too many things. There were few leftovers, and I’ve been repurposing them, like Monday night we had hot vegetable sandwiches with the dip broccoli, steamed, and the marinated mushrooms, and some of the fancy cheeses grated up; some other night I made pasta pesto with the last dab of the layered pesto dip and the remaining pesto; I grated up a bunch of the carrots and radishes that had been out with the dip and made coleslaw with the half head of Tipi cabbage from my winter storage box.
Here’s the party menu:
- Pickled beets and eggs, and deviled eggs – as a beets lover who lives with a beets hater, it was very gratifying to see how fast the beets went;
- sweet sour salmon with challah for dunking in the broth – still not the fishy appetizer of my dreams but a lot easier than shrimp – I’ll try something else next year;
- little wieners wrapped in homemade yeasted dough;
- onion toasts – these are a super easy app made with store bread and mayonnaise and Parmesan cheese, that I had not made in years – people love them so I’m glad I brought them back;
- layered pesto dip with cream cheese and sun dried tomatoes;
- hot spinach dip with baguette slices;
- Quesadillas with roasted squash and parsley pesto and and pepper jack cheese and corn salsa I made last summer;
- crackers & cheese with pepperonta and marinated mushroom to spread on top, or if you’re vegan to simply spread on your cracker sans cheese;
- vegetables and spicy peanut dip which came out a little weird this year – too thick, I think because I used Costco natural peanut butter;
- What one of my cookbooks used to call “ready-mades”: clementines and chex mix and nuts and olives.
I forgot to put out the edamame. We have bags and bags of them because they were a favorite snack of our student last year, but the last Costco bag I bought with 12 little bags inside was a bit too much. Came home when she was losing interest in the edamame. I ditched the stuffing balls – I thought in lieu of meatballs I’d make stuffing balls with the extra stuffing from Thanksgiving that’s in the freezer, and serve them with cranberry sauce that I also have in the freezer. But in the end I decided no one would eat them but me.
And of course cookie platters. Megan took these pics, I of course didn’t manage to.
I did put a lot of cookies on Insta – you can take a look or go to this previous post where I put some links. And here’s a big cookie slideshow.
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