apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I was sick all Christmas Eve, and I just barely managed to throw together some ham and scalloped potatoes with peas for Christmas dinner. We have some friends from out of town coming tomorrow to stay with us for a few days. I think I'll make a nice split-pea soup with the leftover ham, and a nice cinnamon bread pudding to go with it. That should be easy. Now, if I can just get the apartment cleaned up...

Spent Christmas on my own, so it was penne pasta with organic roasted garlic tomato sauce and vegetarian "meat" balls. But for belated "Christmas" dinner I'm having with friends tonight, as well as for the potluck I attended last week, I'm making mashed sweet potatoes with garlic, ginger, and cayenne.

I cooked.
Alot.
But it didn't feel like it took much of my time. Very fun this year...

First, cookies. Walnut rolls from a grandma recipe. Yum. My mother is well pleased that I bothered.

Xmas eve with friends:
Our *traditional* menu is all about good champagne and something easy and delish.
So . . . artichoke pate, marinated olives and fancy cheeses (nice Le Tru, never had it before. Soft ripened cheese made with cow/sheep/goat milk)
champagne
ravioli from Gourmet Garage - Florentine (spinach.ricota) and Gorgonzola/Walnut, in sage butter
green salad with a garlicky mustard vinaigrette
good crusty bread
little chocolates for dessert

Xmas, a bit hung over from all that champers, we wandered around in the lovely foggy Prospect Park.
Revived by dinnertime...which was long braised
+ lamb in red wine/rosemary/sage/thyme/parsley/garlic
+ roasted potato, sweet potato, and brussel sprouts (tiny TINY brussel sprouts, like marbles)
+ fennel olive braise, from the new Gourmet cookbook. It's the first thing I've made from the book. niiiiiice book.

Hope you all enjoyed the tamalfests!

There is nothing like a whole lot of family drama to remind me to have Christmas at home from now on! lol

My husband and I had a simple brown sugar/pineapple juice glazed ham with pineapple rings and potato rolls. It was simple, it was so incredibly delicious, and it only cost about $10 for the whole meal. It's hard to beat that.

Last night while caught in Holiday traffic in Northern California, my parents and I listened to a great radio show featuring Hanukkah-themed jazz music. Listener-sponsored jazz station KCSM has a weekly program hosted by San Francisco broadcasting icon Mal Sharpe called "Back on Basin Street." Last night, his show focused on Hanukkah-themed jazz and swing songs. Below is the program description. (Unfortunately, no program playlist was up on KCSM's website. Nor was the program archived when I checked this morning.)

Program Desription:
"Kenny Ellis' Hanukkah Swings featured on Back on Basin Street with Mal Sharpe, this first night of Hanukkah. Musician, cantor, teacher, and comedian Kenny Ellis' Hanukkah Swings melds the joy of the holiday of Hanukkah with the uptempo beat of the Big Band Sound. It's a real labor of love reflecting Ellis' affection for both Jewish culture and musical idols such as Count Basie, Les Brown and Benny Goodman, to name just a few."

In addition to Ellis' music, other more comic songs were featured: Tom Lehrer's "(I'm Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica" and "(It's Good to be) A Jew at Christmas"--sample lyrics: On Christmas Day, we'll eat Chinese; Walk empty streets until we freeze; Once a year the city's ours alone; Anyone you see must be a Jew; Why not say, "Hi! I'm a Jew, too!"; The goyim are all getting drunk at home.

But Ellis' tracks were the stand-outs for me, especially "Swinin' Dreidel" (an upbeat, jazzy rendition of "The Dreidel Song") which should be a staple for any Holiday party.

this year my beau and i decided to bypass family dramas, er, dinners and make it a nyc extravaganza.

we were so inspired by the talk of the italian christmas eve dinner that we went out to five points' annual christmas eve dinner. their crab soup was loverly, as were the chocolate-ricotta fritters (everything in between was Fine). Afterward we strode about our italian-american brooklyn neighborhood and tried to decide whose house was best decorated. Fierce competition out there!

christmas day we went to our friend's who hosted a big 12-hour-long feast and parlor-game day. chicken adobe stew, pomegranate mint salad, butternut squash and apple soup, prosecco, a rough-hewn chilean wine. The day before we'd raided Sahadi's for ingredients and so came equipped with a mexican chocolate cake and a smoked trout spread (the leftovers of which I slathered on my bagel this morning). All in all we ragtag kids had a lovely holiday. Oh, and we took The Kitchen's request and bought our bundt cake pan at Cook's Companion--excellent resource. Thank you!

My boyfriend and I had an orphan's dinner for anyone stuck in Frankfurt for christmas without family. We ended up with a really eclectic mixed crowd of old a new friends (1 chinese, 1 mongolian, 1 bosnia, 1 czeck, 1 american, 3 germans) and I cooked a HUGE italian meal for all of them.... it was great, if I do say so myself....
we started off with apetizers around the coffee table, 2 fresh cheeses from the turkish deli, one with mint and another with peppers, a nice hunk of gorgonzola dulce and olives, bread, and cucumbers ...and a lovely bottle of Spatbergunder.
Then on to Dinner, we did a huge anitpasto course ( as is my family tradition) with a salad caprese, a garlicy green salad, roasted brussel sprouts, a potato and pepper fratatta, and eggplant roles (my fav)...
Then for the main corse we had Penne with goat cheese and Arrugula.... and about 6 bottles of assorted italian and spanish reds. Just when everyone was sure they could not eat or drink anymore, we cleared the plates, made a couple of pots of coffe and tea, and through a well organized group effort, whipped up a batch of whipped cream for this amazing flourless choclate cake that I got off Nigella Lawson's website. I recomend it whole heartedly, it was simple, easily made the night before and even more easily lapped up by my guests.

Since I stayed solo in NYC, I didn’t cook anything elaborate. But I did make a traditional Eurasian (Malay-Portuguese) Christmas dish called devil curry. It uses chicken, potatoes, and a spice blend that contains a lot of chiles and shallots.

http://goodiesfirst.typepad.com/goodies_first/2005/12/devil_of_a_time.html

I think it was a success. But since I’d never eaten it before, I didn’t have a benchmark.

lisa-
which italian american neighborhood are you referring to? Bensonhurst? Dyker Heights? Bay Ridge? I thought this year was not so over the top as in years past.

i didn't cook a single darn thing
even though i've trained as a chef, shown my mother a million times that i'm an excellent cook and can handle anything, she STILL won't let me touch a single thing in the kitchen when i'm home, no matter how much i beg and beg and BEG
siiiiigh
but at least i did contribute a little by bringing two quarts of Veselka's AMAZING christmas borscht up for xmas dinner
mmmm... vinegary, garlicky, beety soupy goodness!

so, now i've got this entire week off
what should i tackle to get back in the kitchen?
something truly hard and complicated?
or lots of light, healthy goodness (to counteract all the cream and butter?)

something light and intensely flavorful. i long for something healthy and crunchy and fresh right now!

Spent Christmas with my parents in Texas, so we spent all day Christmas Eve making homemade tamales. Pork with Red Chile, Pork with Mole, and Roasted Corn with Goat Cheese. They came out great--I had never tried making them from scratch before, we always just bought them for christmas eve.

I tried two new cookie recipes and given the response they generated, they will become regulars for holidays to come. One was a pfeffernusse cookie and the other was a simple butter cookie with a little hollow in it filled with lingenberry preserves (before baking - which made the finished cookies easier to stack on a plate instead of fresh preserves plopped in post-baking).

I had all kinds of menus in mind for Xmas but settled on several things drawn from different sources:
A duck with turnips and olives, from a NY Times recipe, was the main course, with couscous.
To start I served my two guests white beans al dente ("White Bean Goop", The Cafe Beajoulais Cookbook), and homemade tomato bread ("The Italian Baker").
I also had fun with another recipe from the NY Times, "Stewed Oranges," which was simple enough (whole oranges soaked for 3 days, then stewed in spaces for 3 hours), except the recipe didn't call for enough liquid, but I just added a bit of water when necessary. One guest offered a much better name for them--"Baroque Oranges," since they soft (edible) rind darkens nicely in the stewing process.
For desert I made a lemon souffle tart, also from "The Italian Baker."
While everything thankfully came out very well, my biggest sense of achievement was in pacing the meal so that we all truly had a festive meal that wasn't rushed, with lots of time to drink and enjoy the food and talk. To me there is little point in a special dinner that is gobbbled down in 20 minutes.