And then, there was Christmas

Monday, January 5, 2015

Many people dread the coming of winter, the solstice, the shortening of days. In some ways, I crave winter. It’s my time to hibernate; to stay indoors unapologetically, to go to bed early and be awakened by a tip-toeing 3-year-old.

We were at the lake for the last two weeks and I steadily worked on my nesting PhD. So much so, that when Rodney arrived several days after us, he was shocked to find out that we’d barely set foot outside. The kids were happy, I was happy. We LEGOed, puzzled, cooked and watched nightly movies. Caught up on the classics: The STAR WARS trilogy and Back to the Future; The Parent Trap and Polyanna. We prepared for Christmas – the kids’ grandparents came to visit. We continued our nesting in full force: we ate; we traveled the globe one cocktail at a time: Manhattans, white Russians, apple cider Dark ‘n stormies.

It was the rest that I needed. The rest that we all needed. Unharried and unscheduled.

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Savory

Holiday ham

Monday, December 9, 2013

Thanksgiving is over. Time to stop talking about it, it’s done, let’s all regroup on this topic next year. (That was primarily a note to myself, goodbyes are hard.)

But seriously, it’s time to shelve all of the Thanksgiving talk because truly, we’re deep into the holidays at this point. We need to shift gears. We need to talk about things like snowflake cookies and Yule logs.

Unfortunately, right now I have limited pictures of our holiday food to share with you. Why? Because last year at this time I didn’t have the faintest clue that I’d one day write a blog. But here I am, fessing up, and facing a bit of an emergency: I have to tell you about our Christmas Ham and have no pictures of the end product.

I hope you can forgive me. I’m only a team of one. I’m not Bon Appetit magazine with a staff of recipe testers who start buying, cooking, and photographing holiday hams in June. If I bought a Ham right now for picture purposes, we’d be eating ham leftovers for weeks. Come Christmas I’d be so over ham. And what a horrible tragedy that would be.

But thank heavens for ham steaks, which are available at Whole Foods. Perfect when you’re in a ham pinch but you don’t want to buy the full beast. And it’s just enough meat to showcase the best part of our ham dinner, the king of condiments: mustard.

We haven’t always been Christmas ham devotees. In fact I cooked my first just a few short years ago. In the past we used to serve turkey, a family tradition.

But that was in Canada, where Thanksgiving and Christmas are separated by months, not weeks. In the US, I’m just getting through my freezer stash of turkey leftovers when it’s time for another bird. Too much, too soon. I apologize turkey lovers, apparently I’m showing my true stripes and it’s not impressive. But really, I can only do so much turkey.

So I put my foot down one year. I shook things up. I cooked a capon.

Which is about as different from a turkey as a strip steak is from a T-bone.

But the capon was a foot in the right direction. Old traditions die hard, and this was a tough one to move past.

The following year, emboldened, I thought I’d take an even bigger step. Go for something a little more Dickensian. A goose? Perhaps. But after floating the idea around the family, there was some resistance. Goose didn’t seem appealing to the majority of those polled.

We needed something mainstream, and so we picked ham. Hallelujah, a new tradition was born.

It just so happens that we were having a bunch of friends and family to the lake to celebrate Christmas dinner that year and I wanted an easy dinner. I was wiped out after three straight weeks of ordering, unboxing, sorting, wrapping, labeling, hiding the mountain of gifts that would end up under our tree. While not a spoiler during the other 11 months of the year, I fall hard for the holidays.

So I planned ahead for dinner: I bought a big smoked ham from my butcher Mike, got a bunch of rolls and different kinds of bread from Amy’s in Chelsea Market. (And hey! I was able to dig up some photographic evidence):

And best of all, I stocked up on all kinds of mustards – spicy, sweet, and whole grain. When you’re taking the easy road with dinner, you have to impress with something, and pretentious mustard fits the bill. (By the way, here’s what I’m serving with our dinner this year):

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Family

Wordless Wednesday: the holidays

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

This year Thanksgiving was a total success. No sickness to take us down, we were a crew of entirely healthy adults and kids, the universe was looking down on us.

I was thankful for many things this weekend….

To my neighbor Mike for keeping his fridge bare so that I didn’t have to store my Thanksgiving dishes on a windowsill.

For the same neighbor for bringing me flowers on Thanksgiving day. Even after I’d banged on his front door and dragged him out of his shower to unlock it. (For future reference, Mike, please don’t lock your door on Thanksgiving day. That episode gave me an ulcer and female pattern baldness all at once. But thank you, as always, for lending me some of your fridge space.)

I was thankful that Rodney didn’t see me jam my butter-lathered hands up a turkey’s rear end while still wearing my wedding ring. I’m likewise thankful that even after all of the butt jamming, I still couldn’t find the gizzard bag. It’s a Thanksgiving tradition for me to cook the turkey with the bag still inside, and as you all know, it’s best not to muck with tradition.

I was thankful for our new thrift store art that makes me so joyously happy every day. Even if the kids keep bumping into it and making it ever so slightly off-kilter. At least it’s less aggravating than the Sharpie line drawing that now covers our faux Eames rocking chair.