Christmas Dinner

Merry Christmas!! I am thankful to God tonight for the ability to provide my family a holiday feast, to be shared in our wonderful home with so much love at one table. Tonight, I'm praying for those who have no feast, who have no home, or who are lonely/far from loved ones. We celebrate Christ's birth as the birth of light and hope for all the world, especially those who most need it. My New Year's Resolution is to further endeavor to deserve the abundant blessings I have been given. Now for the food. :)

I made slow cooker butternut squash soup for an appetizer, from this blog: http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/2008/10/crockpot-butternut-squash-soup-recipe.html. The only changes I made were to add some cream and use chicken stock instead of broth. I served it in miniature martini glasses so we could walk around with it - I think it came out really tasty.

Duck Burgundy: (I do this every year - so hard to screw up a duck)- Hal cleans out the innards, then I rub the bird with a bit of oil/salt/pepper and stuff the cavities with chunks of onion, apple and orange. Then I douse the bird with Burgundy wine, leaving plenty in the bottom of the roasting pan, to baste with every 20 minutes or so. Always tender and flavorful. I used some of the pan juices, a shot of brandy, a cup of cider and a few tablespoons of cornstarch to make gravy.

I also made a scalloped potatoes recipe I got out of an old Irish cookbook I have called The Irish Isle. Start with 3 lbs of potatoes, sliced thin. Bring to a boil with 4 cups of milk, 1 tbsp butter, salt/pepper, 1-2 sprigs of thyme and some fresh grated nutmeg. Once it boils, simmer for 10 minutes until potatoes are tender. Stir frequently to prevent a film forming at the bottom. Once tender, use a slotted spoon to pull out half potatoes, spread across a casserole dish. Top with a drizzle of cream and 1/2 to 1 cup of white or marbled cheddar. Repeat with remaining potatoes. Bake at 375 for 1 hour or until browned on top. These were awesome - everyone had multiple helpings.

I also roasted some asparagus in garlic and olive oil (with a bit of lemon zest over the top), and my mom made a salad with pears, walnuts and bleu cheese. Mmm-mmm.

For dessert, I made my first cheesecake! It was a pumpkin cheesecake recipe that I got from my sister's mother-in-law. I made a gingersnap crust and topped it with a cream cheese/sugar/hazelnut spread. The crust was good, but it was really crunchy - not what I expected. I may not have used enough butter. And the cheesecake fell a little more than I would have liked, but it was still incredibly tasty. It may not have been perfect, but it was still delicious.

Overall, I was thrilled with how dinner went. We had a semi-full house. Only 9 people, instead of the 16 (!) I'm having for brunch on Monday morning. Thanks as always to Hal, his parents, my sister-in-law Ginna and nephew Zane, my parents, and Granddaddy Stokes for making me feel like the Santa Claus of the kitchen. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Cookie Trees

Boy, do I love holiday cookies. I also love that its tacitly okay to eat like 10 a day. (Please don't tell my gym instructors I just said that). But if you're going to eat that many, you need a nice variety, right? So it doesn't seem like you just ate the whole package of cookies? No no, you just sampled a few here and there from different groups. It's totally fine. What I love to do is make a "cookie tree" - stack different types of cookies in layers on a large paper/plastic plate, to make a pyramid. Wrap it up in green cellophane (or recycled paper), tied with curling ribbon right at the top of the pyramid. You can leave it there, but I like to add a sparkly star-shaped "pick" to make it festive. I find those at all the craft stores, or places like Garden Ridge. It's an easy way to make a simple, homemade gift that much more festive.

This year, I made my favorite Snickerdoodles and Peppermint Brownies, decorated store-bought sugar cookies with a few nieces/nephews and tried out a new spice cookie that turned out great: chocolate-garam masala-gingerbread cookies from Aarti Sequeira on the Food Network:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/garam-masala-chocolate-gingerbread-recipe/index.html

Give those a shot if you like a spice cookie. I was really happy with them, and I love Aarti - she was my favorite on Next Food Network Star from day 1 this season, and all of her recipes that I've tried are fantastic. For the Peppermint Brownies, just add about a Tbsp of peppermint extract to your regular brownie mix. The Snickerdoodles are here (you can use red/green colored sugar for the topping as well, but don't use JUST that - mix it in with the white sugar or they look TOO festive):

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/snickerdoodles-recipe/index.html

Here are my other favorite cookies that didn't make the Tree group this year, but that I plan to make next week:

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Chocolate-Candy-Cane-Cookies-233372

Happy Eating!

Spring Rolls

I made Spring Rolls for the second time tonight, and I still can't seem to get them wrapped tightly enough. I think its my filling - this time I used shrimp, cucumber, red pepper, scallions, cilantro and angel hair pasta, with a tiny smear of oyster sauce to make it stick. I don't want to load them with cabbage or coleslaw mix like many recipes call for, since I don't like cabbage or carrots. They taste great - the flavor combination seems to work really well with a tiny bit of Hoisin sauce for dipping, they're just hard to grab since everything moves around inside and tries to squeeze out. I've cut everything very very thin (using a mandolin with julienne attachment), so I don't think its a chunk issue. I'm afraid I'll rip the rice paper if I pull it too hard when wrapping. I guess I'll just have to keep trying (more's the pity). Any suggestions?

Leftovers

One of the best things about big food holidays is the leftovers. If you have extra turkey, try it on a roll with Brie and cranberry sauce. I make my cranberry sauce with horseradish, which is great on this sandwich too. The kick is especially nice when it's cold and raining. I hope everyone had as wonderful a Thanksgiving as I did. I feel truly blessed. And very full.

Pumpkin Stew

Thanksgiving week has started! Its the best cooking week of the year, so I like to try a few new things with the traditional. Tonight, my sister and brother-in-law arrived at the beach with us, and I made an Argentinian Pumpkin Stew in a pumpkin shell with cracked pepper biscuits. It was the first time I made a stew inside the pumpkin, and I was disappointed that the pumpkin wasn't as tender as I'd hoped on the inside. Next time, I'll cook it less in the pot ahead and longer in the pumpkin. It looked great though - very festive. And the stew was incredible. It came from a recipe on cooks.com that my old violin teacher, Lynne Webster Sawyer, lead me to last year. As we give thanks this week, I'd like to include that I'm thankful Lynne is still in my life, that Lindsay and Scott are awesome and willing guinea pigs, and that I'm able to indulge in my love of cooking for a whole week with my family. Cheers!

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1948,144178-239207,00.html

(PS - the only changes I made were using beef stock instead of broth for a more robust flavor and swapping the sherry for white wine.)

Getting Ready...

Thanksgiving is coming up quickly - Hal and I are having Thanksgiving with my family in Hilton Head this year, and we're taking the whole week off. Woohoo! That means we're leaving in one week. So today I've spent my non-football-watching time making some food to freeze and take with us. I also made some Wassail in the crock pot, and have been drinking on it all day - one of my favorite holiday traditions: getting half drunk while I cook. My wassail is easy:
1 gallon apple cider
1 bottle red wine (I like something light, like a Pinot Noir)
12-16 oz of orange juice
12-16 oz pineapple juice
couple of cinnamon sticks and cloves
Mix together, heat it up. You can make it in crock pot, large stew pot on the stove, or a large coffee percolator. Its also very easy to cut that recipe down for consumption by only two people while cooking.

I hope everyone is getting as excited about holiday food as I am. Most of my make-aheads today were breads - blueberry croissant French Toast, cracked pepper biscuits and cider-pumpkin muffins. I'm getting my plan ready for the rest of the make-aheads that I'll take care of closer to time also, to make Thanksgiving as easy as possible since we'll have a lot of people in the condo kitchen. And all I'll want to be doing is drinking anyway. :)

Cider-Pumpkin Muffins

My new favorite trick: make a box of instant pumpkin bread mix (I made it as muffins), replace the water with apple cider. The extra flavor is subtle, but quite lovely. I actually tried this out for tailgating a few weeks ago, and got great feedback. This is one of those tricks that's easy to apply to other things: such as replacing water with Frangelico when making brownies. Any other ideas? Cause I'm in a baking mood as the weather gets colder...

Hi There.

Look! I can blog!

At least, I'm trying it out. Bear with me while I learn how to do this, I'm always late to technology parties. But I'd love to share my kitchen adventures and failures, and chat about food with other people who love to eat.  With the fall/winter holidays approaching, I'm already thinking about all the new things I'd like to try out, and all of the traditional foods I'll never change. I figured it was as good a time as any to try this food-blogging thing out. So here goes.