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December 26, 2005
Christmas wrap up
Well, although I didn't get everything done, and we skipped a few dishes (crescent rolls stayed in their tube, and we skipped on the upside down pear gingerbread), we still had a delightful meal and a great time. Note for next year though: get a much smaller ham. 8lbs was way way too much for us. The kitchen was clean, the cheddar bay biscuits were amazing, and it really worked out well having tons of veggie sidedishes that were simple. I wouldn't do the cilantro butter again -- just chopped cilantro would have been much nicer.
After dinner we played PGR3 and just did the whole hanging out thing. Not having a table didn't suck as much as I'd thought it would. As long as things don't have to be cut, people are good to go for the most part because we're all used to eating in front of the tv anyway.
Still more cleaning to do this week, but we might just make it a clean house new year.
Posted by jodikins at 1:01 PM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2005
Christmas Menu
Honeybaked Ham
Scalloped Potatoes
Baked Sweet Potatoes
Broccoli
Corn
Green beans
Apple Cranberry Compote
Cheddar Bay Biscuits
Crescent Rolls
Upside-down Pear Gingerbread
Key lime cheesecake with candied cranberries or cherry pie filling
Hickory Nut cake
Posted by jodikins at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
Agenda for today:
Cooking:
*** Set out cream cheese
*** Set out butter
*** Pick through cranberries
*** Wash and dry cilantro and parsley
Peel apples and slice
Cook apple/cranberry compote
*** Make garlic butter for cheddar bay biscuits, form into small log
*** Make cilantro/lime/chile butter; form into small log
*** Bake graham cracker crust
*** Juice limes
*** Mix up cheesecake and chill
*** Hickory nut cake
*** Hickory nut icing
*** Ice Hickory nut cake
Errands:
*** Pick up organic box
*** Get pgr3
*** Fresh catnip plant
*** Beard trimmer with vacuum
*** Small string of christmas lights
Cleaning:
Finish organizing kitchen counter
Dishes throughout the day
Move boxes from office into garage
*** Take Richard's office stuff upstairs
Laundry
Clean off desk
Clean bathroom
Take out trash
change cat litter
start laundry
clean off kitchen counters
load dishwasher
cook apples and cranberries
move wreaths over to island
clean downstairs bathroom:
vacuum
clean toilet
wipe down toilet and sink
fresh towels
extra tp
wipe mirror
wash potatoes
thinly slice (fp?)
chop crystallized ginger
Posted by jodikins at 9:15 AM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2005
Downtime
Well, the cookies left as scheduled Tuesday around 12:30. Our normal mail dude picked them up, but it was worth the $12.50 not to have to deal with the post office this time of year. Yesterday I did some work and made dinner at home for the first time in a while. Today I'm marinating some chicken in a chile honey lime marinade that I threw together. We'll have that with potatoes and some corn.
Posted by jodikins at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Done
The Cookie Saga should end today sometime between 11:30am and 1:30pm. That's when the USPS is scheduled to come pick up my 11 or 12 cubes of cookieness. If I'd done the labels earlier than 2am PST, I could have had them come out today for free, but it's definitely worth $12.50 to have them come out and grab the packages when I'm expecting them.
So, I ended up not rolling out gingerbread. I really don't have the space in this kitchen that I had in Ashburn, so rolling out, baking, cooling and decorating cookies is just impractical. I ended up rolling the gingerbread dough into balls, rolling the balls in white coarse sugar, and then stamping them down with a spice jar. The coarse sugar added some visual interest and a whole lot of crunch. Next year I'm doubling or tripling the ginger -- they were just too mild for me.
The sugar cookies did not work at all. I think I must have used the other recipe in the cookie cookbook, because these came out absolutely awful. Too crumbly to roll out, too crumbly to roll into balls to do thumb print cookies. Ugh. All in all the boxes were small, but still bountiful I think. Everyone got some scotcheroos, some peanut blossoms and some gingerbread cookies. Most people got some boozy balls too, though I think those are probably pretty crappy, heh.
Posted by jodikins at 8:35 AM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2005
Peanut Butter
When I bought a 2.5lb jar of peanut butter, I thought it was probably overkill. Two batches of scotcheroos and a double batch of peanut blossoms later, I'm completely out of peanut butter, and I still have another batch or two of scotcheroos to make :)
Still baking the peanut blossoms but they are coming out beautifully.
Posted by jodikins at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
Too quiet on the cookie front
Last night before bed, I made a batch of scotcheroos. This morning I divided the pan into 6 pieces, and then cut those into slices and made 6 plates of them. Two or three more pans of scotcheroos should do it. In a few I'll start the dough for the peanut blossoms and get that mixed up and popped in the fridge. Then another pan of scotcheroos so they can sit and harden for a few hours
Posted by jodikins at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2005
Orange Oil
Boyajian orange oil is one of the most amazing products I've ever smelled. Tonight I mixed up the gingerbread dough, and I mixed the butter for sugar cookies and apricot foldovers (for my parents) with 1/8 tsp of lemon oil and 1/4 tsp orange oil, and copious amounts of vanilla extract. Those are going to rock. Speaking of gingerbread, I wound up cutting up a fair amount of crystallized ginger, soaking that in the melted butter (was about 1/3c finely chopped ginger), and adding about a tablespoon of grated fresh ginger in place of the 2 tsps of dried ginger that the recipe called for. I also substituted 1/4c heavy cream and 1/4c milk for the evaporated milk that I didn't bother to pick up. Everything was pretty wet, so I ended up adding an extra 1/2c of flour, but I think everything will still be okay. I'm going to try the Alton Brown hint of using powdered sugar to roll things out instead of flour.
And finally, I sampled a boozy ball tonight -- they are very good, a nice kick at the end, but not overpowering. I still might experiment with cherry/kirsch/almond/nilla wafer not chocolate balls. Those should be significantly easier since I have the ground almond flour from Surfas. I'll just toast that in a pan a bit beforehand and then go with it.
Posted by jodikins at 2:08 AM | Comments (0)
December 9, 2005
More on cookies
I'm once again readjusting expectations :) Sugar cookies and anything made with that dough will just be for ornaments for our tree, and for my parents. I'm only going to do one rolled out cookie for the boxes and that will be the gingerbread. Gingerbread, boozy balls, scotcheroos, peanut blossoms, and almond jam sticks is plenty of variety.
And yay for packing well and labeling things well. I had a box in the garage marked holiday pans, etc. In that I found all of my cookie cutters, the great molded Christmas tree muffin pan that I picked up for $2 after Christmas last year, and thank god... ALL of the petit four holiday papers that I'd also picked up after Christmas last year. So, I have 600 tiny holly muffin cups for candies and small goods. I'll probably only be using those for the boozy balls, but they are nice to have.
Tomorrow I'm going to pick up some small holiday plates to put things on to wrap up and separate in the boxes.
Posted by jodikins at 1:26 AM | Comments (0)
December 8, 2005
Cookie #1 down
Made the not-rum balls tonight. Took about two hours (an hour to get the skins off the hazelnuts and toast them, and an hour to prep and form the balls). Not sure how they taste. I decided to go all hazelnut on them -- ground toasted hazelnuts and Frangelico for the liquor. We'll see what kind of reviews they get. It didn't make a huge batch, so I was debating either making another batch tomorrow or making an orange ball with Nilla Wafers and Grand Marnier. But I've tried to move away from everyone getting some of everything -- some people are just going to get screwed out of certain things :)
Tomorrow I'm going to work on the gingerbread recipe. I want to try to use some of this crystalized ginger that I bought instead of powdered or fresh. I might use a mix of the crystallized and some fresh (for more bite). One person on the list is allergic to citrus, and the gingerbread calls for lemon extract, so I was going to try to avoid that. More to the point, I'm fairly certain that the Colonial Williamsburg residents didn't have lemon extract :)
Posted by jodikins at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
December 3, 2005
Birthday and beyond
Leslie singlehandedly made sure that my birthday was non-sucky :) We did some shopping -- mostly bought things for Richard, mind you, got our nails redone, and had yummy Chinese food for lunchies. I very much like Grand Peking's crab rangoon and sweet and sour pork.
Richard took me to the dinner of my choice, which was Claim Jumpers. I tried out the tuna sammich that Leslie recommended. I wasn't a huge fan, but it didn't suck. It's not on my list of things to get at Claim Jumper again though. Then since it was my birthday, I decided to finally try their "I Declair" dessert. It was vile. A gigantic, floppy, not fresh eclair with a tiny bit of lumpy custard, covered with this plasticine "hot fudge sauce" that had obviously been sitting in a warmer forEVER. That in and of itself would have just been disappointing. But no. They had to fuck it up by putting the gigantic floppy eclair on top of some really nice french vanilla ice cream. Then the vile part. They covered the entire exposed side surfaces with vertical stripes of overwhipped heavy cream. *BARF* It looked like Devil's Tower. It tasted just ugh. What a waste of birthday splurging!
Then we came home and played Halo :)
Today, I decided on what boxes to use for mailing treats -- 7x7x6 priority mail boxes. I'm going on the theory that I'll either buy or cut 6x6 squares of cardboard, and then wrap and stack things in the boxes and mail them out. That way we can mix and match items and things are fairly consistent.
Posted by jodikins at 3:40 PM | Comments (0)
December 2, 2005
Snow
Yesterday we had some snow, probably about an inch heading into the afternoon. Later in the evening though, we picked up some more snow. I'd tried to go to sleep early, but was awakened by the electric going out (yeah, you'd think that's when i'd be able to sleep best, but no). So, Richard was up soon after, and I grabbed the flashlight and went and got candles. I made Richard look up the PSE website so that I could report the outage. And about 10 minutes after that service was restored. Unfortunately, I was decidedly untired after all of this, so I came downstairs to take care of a few things.
Oh yeah, happy birthday to me! Leslie and I were going to try to head out today to do some fun stuff, but I really think we'll have to postpone that given the road conditions up here on the hill. No biggie if that doesn't come together today :) If we end up housebound, then I'll just work on the Christmas goodies list, and figure out the logistics of that. I'm not sure who all we sent stuff to last year, but it went out too late. This year, I'm just going to block off some time this weekend to churn stuff out and get it in the mail. I think it might be helpful to stagger things, and not to focus on uniform offerings. Before I've been caught up in making everything exactly the same for each person, but let's face it, they're not going to see that someone else got something different :)
Almond bar cookies (easy to make in sheets, varying flavors based on jam on top)
Scotcheroos (easy to make in large batches, quick mix/fix)
Gingerbread?
Cranberry bread?
Bourbon balls
Sugar cookies
Posted by jodikins at 2:23 AM | Comments (0)