Let there be peace

Child B, and Child ‘Cs arm, immortalized in Christmas memories.

And leftovers.

It was a fine Christmas dinner at Chez Brockwell. There was about five times more to eat than we needed or wanted, there was much joy, fun and chaos as gifts were opened. There were tons of laughs, and a tear or two.

In other words, it was just about a perfect Christmas, never mind it was a couple of days early.

I went to bed last night with the kitchen semi-clean, and with the avowed intention of doing no more than was needful to sustain life today. I have fulfilled that. I have put about six dishes into the mostly-full dishwasher, and run it (I have not emptied it, thankyouverymuch), and I have fixed potato skins for Child A, and I have eaten copious amounts of Christmas leftovers and am working on my second glass of good Scotch.

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Baskets, check. Now on to dinner

Now, who’s been naughty and who’s been nice?

Whoo, Lawd. Treat baskets are done, three of them delivered, two more getting picked up tonight, and a few extra small food gifts on hand for for whoever may show up.

Now, I’ve got to contemplate the logistics of cooking Christmas dinner while finishing housecleaning, tomorrow.

Ack! It’s here!

And all my Christmas stuff is not, yet, but I’m counting on UPS, USPS and FedEx to pull me through. A quick dash out for stocking stuffers, and I’ll be good to go (crossing all fingers and toes).

Of more concern, at this moment, is Christmas dinner, which is actually two days BEFORE Christmas, on Sunday.  And treatmaking that needs to be finished. I think I will declare all next week “kitchen week,” with the exception of Monday, when I have to go to Sikeston, Mo., a 2 1/2 hour drive, for a meeting.

I’m about to get a menu hammered out.  Roast beef, ham and turkey for sliders on homemade rolls. Cranberry salad. Potato salad. Mac and cheese. Marinated broccoli and cauliflower and carrots.  A fruit salad. Cheeses and assorted crackers and crostini. Deviled eggs. Pickle-y things. And just to make it festive, some caviar. I have a jar squirreled away in the pantry. Dessert is either a pecan pie cheesecake or banana pudding.

Treats are a different animal. I need to make two more applesauce cakes. I need to make more chocolate oatmeal cookies and some macaroons, and I’ll also make a couple of other kinds — maybe Italian horn cookies, probably pecan meltaways. Maybe some oatmeal cookies with candied fruit in them, as I have some of that I won’t use in the applesauce cakes.  A couple of loaves of banana bread, being that I have bananas going south.

A Thanksgivin’ dinner that couldn’t be beat

Let there be turkey!

Yes, it’s a repetitious headline. It’s a repetitious holiday. Comes around every year, fourth Thursday in November.

Given my fondness for excess, it is little wonder Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love the cooking, the eating (not so much the putting up and cleaning up), the traditional dishes. Of which I always make too much.

We had all the classics: Turkey, dressing, gravy, sweet potato casserole, cranberry salad, deviled eggs, Brussels sprouts, broccoli salad, grape salad, homemade rolls. Had dessert, too — two kinds of pie which no one ate. Have a vat of everything left, except for what I sent home with Child C.

Thankful for red beans and rice, and Thanksgiving prep!

Tonight’s dessert — apple cranberry walnut crisp.

Smells all Cajun up in here.

Child B and her fam are coming tonight for a small pre-Thanksgiving family get-together, and since I didn’t figure she wanted turkey and dressing two days in one week, I asked her if she wanted red  beans and rice.

“YES!” was her reply.

You know how you have that one dish that you can call a kid, tell them the name of the dish, a date and a time, and they’re there? That’s hers. For Child A, it’s zucchini fritters. Child C is pretty flexible. SIL 1 goes for mac and cheese, while for SIL 2, it’s either country fried steak or pot roast.

Curry, grandkids and Easter

Authentic? Who knows. But decent curry.

Yes, it’s one of those disparate posts. Deal with it.

The above may well not be, as the recipe contends it is, “Authentic” Thai Massaman curry, but it was good. And it’s entirely doable in the Instant Pot, which is always a recommendation.

The recipe is here. How it was, was, like this. I had some beef “fajita strips” in the freezer, and I was looking for a recipe that would accommodate ’em. Indian’s out. I didn’t want anything European, read conventional, nor did I want, well, fajitas. Thai leapt to the forefront. So I Googled “Thai beef.”

And came up with a plentitude of recipes, including this one, which drew my eye, first because it was Instant Pot-able, and second because the fajita strips, which had been in my way every time I’d looked for something in the freezer in the last two weeks, had suddenly become impossible to find.

Back in the kitchen, after a non-cooking week

AGCs and hospitals will play hell with your cooking. There were no exceptional meals, though he thought the grilled cheese and fries were just fine.

We are cooking today. We had not cooked much at all this week, being that we were in Little Rock with AGC2, who had surgery on his ear to, we hope, correct the recurring infections. Came home Thursday, was so exhausted I did little but sit around Friday, had soup kitchen Saturday, and sprang forward today, which pretty much did me in for going to church. Plus, it’s a rainy, yucky day. Not a good excuse for skipping church, I know, but it’s the one I’m using.

In any event, I got up in a notion to cook. So far I have put on a batch of yogurt; made a quiche with tasso ham and grated gruyere; have a loaf of date nut bread in the oven, and just put a fig-blueberry crisp in the oven.

That’s a balanced meal, right?

I wanted to put smoked duck in my quiche, but I’m damned if I can find the duck I smoked and stuck in the freezer. I did clean out a few things from the freezer that were old enough to vote, not to mention have freezer burn on them. The quiche looks lovely; I’m waiting for it to cool down enough to be ready to eat.