The other night some friends (Steve & Heike) came over for dinner. I guess it was still a bit of fallout from having the cookie party on blizzard night – they had not made the party. Last year, the year of the broken thumb for cookie season, Heike was my kitchen manager for the party. […]
We just had a Christmas dinner that couldn’t be beat – and the clean up took much less time than either Thanksgiving or the cookie party. We ate pork roast, mashed potatoes & celery root, sweet sour purple cabbage, and roasted green beans. And for dessert, orange flan that I flamed with Grand Marnier, and […]
For starters, we walked to Starbucks for coffee. Mark predicted it would be packed and it was, and largely our demographic – mom & dad out for coffee until the kids come back for Christmas. We sat down at a shared table, and when the other person already sitting there raised her head, it was […]
Despite my prediction of a grey Christmas turning out to be premature – we have a couple of inches of new white stuff that has been slowly accumulating since morning – Christmas Eve Day has provided probably equal parts of Christmas-y and UN-Christmas-y glimpses: Mark on his knees next to the couch by his ailing […]
Since it’s the week before Christmas, I went to work-related holiday parties the last two nights. The first was at the home of two of the younger faculty members in my department, so it was a collection of mostly 30- and 40-something professional people, some in their 20s, a fair number of kids in the […]
So Saturday the 11th was the blizzard; all last week it stayed cold. Then last night, we got a few more inches of snow, that changed to freezing rain. Now it’s about about 32 degrees, and seems like we’re getting all set to have the same kind of grey, slushy Christmas we had last year. […]
The cookie fairy has been making her appointed rounds all week, taking cartons and platters of cookies to people who didn’t make the party, or who live too close by for it to be worth it to mail – tho, I have to admit, Sally’s house off Junction Rd, is really the outskirts of Madison […]
I guess, if last year was the cookie season with a broken thumb, this year was the cookie party of the blizzard. We had about 40 – 50 people, which is probably 1/3 to 1/2 the usual number. (100+ folks). I think I’ve been too buried under snow, or cookies, or both, to write. On […]
Wednesday was the last night of cookie baking, then I shifted over to apps. I made the hazelnut truffles, a recipe from the December 2001 Gourmet, that seems to be one of those issues with just a lot of good stuff – these truffles (hotly debated in the recipe forums – “Not really a truffle […]
Tuesday was ruggelach night. Well, I glazed the rainbow cookies with chocolate, and cut them up, and I made the windmill dough logs and chilled them to be sliced & baked, but mostly it was all ruggelach, all the time, 6:00 – 11:00. I got a new, giant Tupperware from the nearby hardware store that […]