A post in 3 parts …
Hope everyone had a great holiday! This year we spent it home in Seattle. On Christmas Eve day the kid and I found ourselves still shopping. Sheesh. Once that was over there was still so much to do. I made baked eggs for lunch, leftover ham & swiss cheese to flavor. It was good and bad. No worries, just an experiment.
Next it was the dough for our cookies for Santa. In our tour of local store shopping, we purchased a couple of CHristmas books at Ravenna Third Place Books, including Gingerbread Pirates.The child was pretty insistent that we leave Santa some of our own gingerbread pirates overnight. “Make it so!” I said (not really), but indeed we did. I used Eileen’s Spice Gingerbread Men recipe from AllRecipes.com, to a tee (well, replacing the margarine with butter) and they came out really nice.
As the dough chilled, onto the next project, Christmas Eve wontons. Is this a tradition? Not really, but it could be. I wanted to do something for dinner, didn’t want to do the SC. Wanted Chinese food, but didn’t want to order takeout. Wontons is the one recipe I know from scratch, so that was that. Once the wontons were made, we rolled out the gingerbread dough and cutout some cookies. Our skull-and-crossbones cutter acted as the hat to our Gingerbread boy cutout, and voila! A gingerbread pirate. We also had a few candy canes (aka the Christmas J), snowmen, stars and elves.
Cookies cooling, back to wontons! Wow, busy day in the kitchen. I still haven’t figured out the skin – filling ratio, so we had quite a bit of filling left. (Filling: gound pork, turkey and some chopped spinach with a little ginger root and soy sauce). Solution? Some pork/turkey meatballs to add to the protein of this dish.
Kid was the “skin hander-over” (didn’t want to her touching raw meat). An excellent helper, and she tends to eat the stuff she helps with. Sometimes. Maybe I was just lucky as she devoured these. Yay! Maybe just some pre-Christmas excitement.
Dinner complete, we were ready to frost our gingerbread cookies. Rather than making frosting from scratch, this year I let Duncan Hines help me out. Thanks, Duncan!
Arrr! This was the plate we left out for Santa. Lily added a carrot for the reindeer, a small glass of milk and a letter so that it was clear to Santa that he was welcome to these delicious cookies.
Phew! Santa enjoyed the cookies quite a bit. He might have thrown a few away because they were a bit heavy on the frosting, and he’s really not into artificial frosting flavor. Maybe that happened.
Christmas morning! Was a blast. Husband got me a sweet new DSLR. I’ll have to show off its talent in another post, as yesterday’s photos were just for fun, like this one, kiddo singing with her new Singalong Microphone:
Kiddo couldn’t wait to head to her grandparent’s house (translation: more presents!). On the dinner menu: Prime Rib (yum!), Yorkshire Pudding (YUM!), green beans (still delicious) and marionberry pie with french vanilla ice cream (tasty!). Not a great pic, but the lighting conditions were not ideal. This photographer is still learning how to use her camera, too.
A long last few days with a lot of food in the house. For some reason, this morning, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to test out a pumpkin pancake recipe (see this post for my previous history with the pumpkin pancake). This time I used Chef John’s recipe on AR (I used his banana bread recipe earlier. I found it ok, though I probably shouldn’t have tweaked it). One word: Success. Woot! Kiddo ate many of them. Maybe too many of them. I was pleased with the results, too.
Next up, some more baking! It never ends. Well, it will end at the end of the year. Then I’ll be off bread & grains again. For a while. After a month of totally unnecessary treats and sweets, all good things much come to an end.
Hope you enjoyed a fun and delicious holiday.