Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

Time is especially funny this time of year. Two weeks ago Christmas was barely over – and it was still 2012.

Barely a month ago – Dec. 14 – it was the day before the cookie party, and my life was quite different. Rather than slaving over a hot computer, trying to compose meaningful exercises and educational experiences for library school students, I was slaving over a hot stove – in my kitchen late at night, composing sweets & savories to tempt party guests.

So I suppose I can be forgiven for allowing time to pass by since I last wrote.

It’s been back to work, getting ready for the semester that’s starts Jan. 22.

I’ve had a couple of cooking fiascos – the roasted pumpkin pie last Sunday – it went in the garbage Thursday. Yesterday I made a version of a Food 52 hot bacon dressing slaw. I only made a half batch – split the egg, and gave the extra half to the cat – and instead of napa cabbage, I used a wedge of purple cabbage that had been in the vegetable bin for quite some time, supplemented with a chunk of green cabbage from the giant head that came in my last CSA box in December. I chopped the cabbage in the food processor, and that made it kind of mushy. The purple cabbage made it kind of an alarming color. Otherwise it tasted pretty good.

I think I’ll make pizza pockets for the Packer game tomorrow – with any luck they’ll come out a little better.

Posted from my iPhone – mostly

Back at the end of the last semester – fall 2012 – after the cookie party, but before Christmas (like 2 weeks ago <grin>), I was pretty sure there was something seriously wrong with me, incipient Alzheimer’s, brain tumor, something really bad – because it hurt to think.

Christmas break wasn’t nearly long enough – today, Jan. 3, is already my second day back at work – but I still have had some chances to sleep in and generally catch up on sleep. Last night I went to bed at 11:30 p.m., and felt well-rested by 6:00 a.m. – so in a rush of well-being, post-shower, I decided I must’ve simply been sleep deprived. After all,  I was staying up late baking cookies, and getting up early to go to work.

As the day has worn on, though, I’ve tired and don’t feel as good – maybe an argument for early bed time tonight, too.

pumpkin-cranberry and Cherry

Was a large scale mess. I tried to make eggs Benedict with real Hollandaise – I used to make a batch of Hollandaise with 36 eggs and 6 pounds of butter on Sunday mornings at 6:00 a.m. when I opened for brunch at Ovens East – but the memory of doing that was not helpful trying to make a 3-egg-half-pound-of-butter size batch this morning. It broke, and I tried one of the standard fixes, which is to buzz it in a blendor – to discover that my blendor seemed broken, too. The blades just wouldn’t turn. Tried the food processor, too. Long story short we had poached eggs on Canadian bacon on English muffins with cheese and hot sauce. But I had to clean the blendor (which, happily, worked after cleaning – seemed that’s all it needed to free the blades), and the food processor, the two sauce pans and 2 skillets I used for the Hollandaise, to poach eggs, and to cook the Canadian bacon, not to mention all the egg-coated eating off of plates for three people having breakfast.

I also made a cherry Danish from Food 52. That was good. The recipe gives you a choice of one big or two small – I opted for the two small, which were actually pretty big. Not sure if one large one would have been possible to cook done in the middle. Amanda replaces her mother’s candied cherries with dried cherries soaked in rum; I replaced those with thawed out Door County pie cherries.

I got more presents than I expected – stainless steel cookie sheets that were written up in the Milwaukee paper at the beginning of December (Mark got John to go pick them up in Milwaukee, where they’re made; because they’re stainless steel they’re so heavy the shipping costs as much as the sheets), iPhone gloves, a book of food poetry, and a fancy market bag with separate compartments for different vegetables. Not counting the sound system that Mark and I bought for each other – powered speakers that you can hook anything to, and a USB turntable, so I can buy the new Peter Buck LP, and rip it. Not to mention my dozen or 14 or so vinyl records that I never listen to, that I now can.

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So – this year’s cookie party. Everyone came early – at 6:00 the place was packed. I think it’s just the scheduling. Because it was a Saturday and x number of days before Christmas – everyone had somewheres else to go. Party hopping, or going to a seasonal show. Al had gone to Target earlier in the day to buy socks, and he said the menswear department was empty; everyone was buying party stuff: bottles of wine, chips, paper napkins and plates with Christmas decorations on them.

The rainbow cookies were the last cookie kind again – I made them Friday and glazed and cut them up Saturday morning. I was cooking till after midnight the night before the party, but I probably left a few too many sweets for party day: glazing rainbow bars, mint brownies, stuffing dates with marzipan, and dried fruit bark. I didn’t start plattering cookies until 3:00, and I was sweating to get them all out by 5:00. And no platter pictures.

A few of the things I learned:

• Don’t need three hot dips – everybody ate the buffalo chicken and artichoke; the spinach was too much.

• I’m really glad I made the shrimp hot – black pepper shrimp, lots of butter and people could dunk bread into it – instead of the shrimp sticks.

• The pepperoni roll was my favorite – I ate the last two slices while I was cleaning up.

• Bacon dates with fresh mozzarella seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect, not so much. By the time the bacon was cooked, most of the cheese had sort of burned off, leaving the dates to look even more insect-like than usual.

• Someone either bumped into or was fiddling with the thermostat – somehow it got set to 78º – and we were all meltingly hot by 9:30, when I noticed and turned the heat off. I left it off overnight and it was still 67º by morning – of course, it only went down to like 45º that night.

• If you don’t put the deviled eggs out right away, there might even be some leftover

• Planning to make a double batch of that salmon appetizer was insane – but meant we had salmon for dinner on Friday, and extra smoked salmon at the party. I was determined to use up foodstuffs our South African house guests had left in the freezer, which included a hunk of salmon and a package of chicken (see Buffalo chicken below)

Here’s the full list of party foods, so’s maybe I can recall my lessons for next year – deviled eggs; pesto & sundried tomato and cream cheese torta; greens & feta pie – made sort of flat with crosses in the middle (I had said I was going to make kale-a-kopita, and Mark’s horrified reaction decided me to do something else with the kale); pepperoni roll with home made pizza sauce – I forgot to get the canned at Sentry and Copps didn’t have my brand (Muir Glen) which gave me enough time to realize that I had some in the freezer; cheese & crackers – the cheeses were several Goudas – aged, Farmer John’s smoked, and the Marieke with fenugreek, and a big hunk of Costco British Stilton; sausage & cheese platter with Columbus hard salami & Tillamook cheddar – also Costco – not local but good; salmon squares – smoked and cooked flaked fresh salmon, mixed with lemon juice and butter and cream, on a rye bread crumb crust, with dill and cucumbers on top – plus the extra smoked salmon on the side; my favorite spicey dill dip that has chili sauce & Worcestershire sauce in it, with yellow carrots and orange carrots and beauty heart radish from my CSA box; baked Brie with cranberries; little wienies in homemade yeasted dough, some with jalapeños; bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed dates; Costco brine-packed olives that I simmered in olive oil and garlic with a sprig of rosemary, and actually improved them; chex mix saved in the freezer since Thanksgiving; latkes with applesauce & sour cream – it was the last night of Hannukah; nuts; trio of hot dips, artichoke, spinach – the one that I didn’t need, and buffalo chicken; and of course – 6 platters of assorted cookies.

I made the dough for seeded flat bread, to top with leek confit and goat cheese – but I on purpose did not make those. I bought a box of Costco crab rangoons and plain forgot them – and the edamame.

On Sunday morning all I had left to clean up was the wine glasses and the baking sheet from the dates. I did the glasses in the dishwasher and sheet by hand. All the leftover cookies fit under the cake dome – although I had had to refrigerate one of the serving platters to firm up the rainbow cookies enough to pick them up.

We had breakfast – eggs & bacon and I fried three of the leftover latke potatoes – and I got started stuffing cookies into ziploc bags for shipping. Took a break to go to another librarian’s holiday party – a re-assortment of many of the same people from the night before. I took a bottle of champagne, and my sparkly tights kept slipping down on the walk over. I rifled the cabinets in our host’s bathroom and found a bobby pin to hold them up on the walk back. I went back to packing and shipping cookies, except for a break to watch Homeland. By 1:30a, I had most everything bagged, and the boxes to be UPS’d packed – the two giant ones to my bro and Chad & Lea who have moved to a goat farm in Southern Oregon to live with their daughter Liz and her beau, and the one smaller one to the former director of the library school and her husband. They used to be neighbors and walked to the party but they retired to their summer home in Canada earlier this year.

I was so asleep I didn’t even hear John & Megan come in at 2:00a.m.

Monday morning back to packing & shipping – sent the kids off, and went to UPS. By 4:00 I had packed and labeled 20 postal flat rate boxes, medium & large. Mark helped me take them to the post office – it worked a charm – I located a post office worker, said I had 20 boxes and didn’t want to jam the drop – she gave us a cart and took them direct to the back. We were in and out in less than 10 minutes.

After that I tried to accomplish stuff – I washed empty cookie bucket and containers and put them away. I baked the seeded flat bread, to cool and freeze, and topped one with butter & Parmesan – chomp. I think I was in such a state of exhaustion that I was famished – my body was so tired it thought it needed fuel. So, finish off the few last handfuls of chex mix – sure. A dozen or so M&Ms that no kids had eaten yet – why not. Broken cookies – finish the plate. I went and settled on the couch – my first time to collapse and watch TV in the evening since the beginning of cookie season – and got cats to hold me down – and lick off the cookie plate. Watched Homeland to fill in on the parts where I’d gotten dozy on Sunday – I got sleepy again, but I managed to see the parts I’d missed. Probably I just really wanted to see Mandy Pantinkin reciting mourner’s kaddish again – I think I liked that so much because of a) Mandy’s voice; and b) in the TV show, his character is taking comfort from reciting the words, even if he’s not doing it exactly the way the faith directs us – which is how I use them, too. Sort of the same thing with Downton Abby – watched two old episodes, dozed some, but saw some good parts. Think I might have to do that tonight, too.

Leftover cookies under dome