NYE

Post-holiday roundup

Well. This christmas I got food poisoning and spent most of the day either in bed or face down on the floor, so I have zero delicious holiday food to discuss. How about we talk about some of the presents I gave instead?

Like everyone else on the internet, I wanted to give some handmade gifts this year. I had been half-planning to give out little bottles of homemade schnapps, but since 90% of the people to whom I give presents live at least 500 miles away, and the post office doesn't ship alcohol, that was out. So instead I went to the bulk bins and grabbed everything I needed to make some homemade pickling spice and barbecue rub.

The only ingredient that wasn't in the bulk bins was celery salt. Well, then! I made a batch of that as well. It's a good thing the farmer's market around here regularly features gigantic leafy heads of celery. The end product turned out so well I considered giving it away too. Then I realized that I hadn't had brunch with anyone in so long that I didn't know who else actually drank bloody marys, so I decided to just use it for my own.

I had initially wanted to package these in little spice jars, but ended up going with plastic bags instead. This was due to both 1. shipping costs and 2. the high likelihood of glass jars breaking in the flurry of holiday mail. It's ok though! Festive ribbon totally saves the day, right?

I have to say, there was an awful lot of ribbon all over the place this season. It was by far the most Martha Stewarty I have been in years.

Merry christmas

Christmas eve

Today is the day for the annual making of a large vat of marinara sauce, shredding of several blocks of cheese, kneading of a whack of dough, chopping of all the vegetables, & assembly, baking, and eating of our own delicious pizzas for dinner. Yes! Christmas eve pizza party at our house!

We have:
- mozzarella, asiago, parmesan, and romano cheese
- peppers hot and mild and green and red
- a big bag of delicious tiny cremini mushrooms
- red onion, yellow onion, garlic, shallot
- a stick of salami for me, because pepperoni is too much but salami is just right
- oregano, basil, red pepper flake, & other appropriate spices
- tomato puree and olive oil
- flour, yeast, water, honey

This will clearly work out splendidly. I do need to figure out a different crust recipe, but that is a manageable task for the day.

Since there is also a half pound of ground lamb in the fridge, I may end up mixing and spicing and cooking it sausage-style, then putting sausage crumbles on at least one pizza. Lamb sausage would be pretty great on pizza, wouldn't it? I even have fennel seed to add! Oh man, what a great idea! THIS MAY NOW HAPPEN.

So we will make and eat a delightful variety of pizza.

We will also deliver lots of the aforementioned almond cookies to our next-door neighbor and the coffeeshop that is functionally my office.

Later we will go out with a thermos (or most likely my stainless steel water bottle, since we have not acquired an actual traveling drinking device not made of gross-tasting plastic since last year at this time) filled with black russians, and walk all over town and look at the lights and pretend it's colder than 40F, which it won't be.


Tomorrow after presents we're going to go have massive holiday breakfast at Veronica's. I am further going with tradition and bringing cranberry orange nut bread, although minus the nuts. This is actually also tradition, since both John and I find walnuts disgusting in baked goods. Besides that, there will be eggs and coffee and mimosas and coffeecake and homemade bagels and cream cheese.

In short, yay holidays!

Pre-holiday cookies

Last week I went to a cookie swap and came home with all the delicious cookies in the land. For my contribution, I made our usual holiday cookies from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book. They're easy, tasty, and not too sweet.

The recipe makes--wait for it---5 DOZEN COOKIES. So clearly I had to double the batch, right? Right. The doubled recipe barely fit in my mixing bowl, so you should probably use two bowls (or a really gargantuan one) if you want to do such a thing. This also means that I now have three extra rolls of cookie dough waiting and ready in the freezer. Yay, spontaneous future cookies!

Swedish farmer cookies

2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cups sugar
1 cup slivered almonds--use the thinnest slices you can find, not the big chunks
1 tbsp molasses
2/3 cup softened sweet butter
1 egg
2 tbsp water

Mix everything together and form the resulting dough (which will look crumbly, but is really not) into 3 or 4 long skinny rolls. Just squeeze them together with your hands.

Wrap the rolls in foil or plastic wrap and stick them in the fridge to chill for at least an hour. Then slice each roll into 1/4 inch cookies and bake at 400F on parchment-covered or greased cookie sheets for 8-10 minutes. You want to take them out of the oven when they’re just barely golden brown.

Now you have cookies! Eat them with all the tea.