Holiday Preparations

For Christmas, I'm catering again for my parents.  We cook the meal at my house, then pack it all into a cooler with a couple of bricks that we bake, along with the ham, to keep the hot stuff at least warm until we arrive, and keep the stuff that needs to stay cool separate.  Then we drive over to their place, and unpack it all, to be served buffet style.

My dad loves ham, and the rest of us like it, too, so that's what we serve for Christmas.  There must be stuffing, for my dad, and potatoes au gratin for me.  Dad also loves his cranberry sauce, so there must be that.  I make it with fresh cranberries, apples, and a handful of craisins.  We call it "crapplesauce" in private; it tastes anything but crappy, though.  And, we have to have a pumpkin pie.  Why, I don't know, but we all like it, with vanilla whipped cream, so I make those from scratch, too.

In October, we buy our pumpkins from a local pick-your-own farm, then use them later for their food value.  It's not difficult to make and freeze your own pumpkin mash, as long as you use a food mill with the finest insert/die, and leave it to drain in a coffee strainer for a few hours before bagging and freezing it, by the pint.  One pint = one pie.  Or, a quart of soup, if that's the way you roll.

Cookies.  There have to be cookies.  I like to make spice cookies and cream cheese cookies, both of which utilize a cookie press.  The spice ones, if you ball the dough and just bake them like that, resemble and taste like pfefferneusse, minus the anise.  For the cream cheese ones, it doesn't really matter what die you use in the press, but the star shaped one makes nice wreaths, which I can sprinkle with green sugar, just to give them a holiday look.

I used a BB&B coupon today to get bucks off a few kitchen gadgets I wanted:  a really sturdy silicon spatula, one of those things to measure out shortening or lard, so you can scrape it off the top, rather than trying to carve it out of a measuring cup, and a small "ice cream scoop" to use for measuring out cookie dough for drop style cookies.  Yes, the small pleasures of (small) kitchen gadgetry make me happy, as long as they're not too expensive.  The fat measuring thingy is the only one trick pony in the bunch, and I can live with that.

The candy has also been made: peppermint bark and peanut brittle.  I was a little too low on butter to make a batch of English toffee, even though I had all the rest of the ingredients, so peanut brittle it was.

We'll still need to make a grocery run over the weekend for fresh veggies and few other items, but we basically have Christmas covered.

We already bought the frozen duck for New Year's Eve.  I saw it in the grocery store last week, and grabbed one, because they don't always have them when I want one.  Besides, we had the freezer space.  I make that with a mushroom, sage, long grain and wild rice mix, and whatever other side dishes grab me at the time.

My family never had a New Year's Eve tradition when I was growing up, but duck has become ours over the past decade or so.  We got stuck doing a goose one New Year's Eve, because we couldn't find a duck; the goose was fine, but not worth the cost, and the mess the dog caused when he toppled the roasting pan  full of grease from the stovetop (minus the goose) onto the floor took me an hour to clean properly, so that we wouldn't slip.  No.  More.  Goose.

Recipe: Peanut Brittle

This recipe is fairly idiot-proof. I've adapted it from one I found on Food Network, attributed to "Sweet Dreams," which I believe was Gale Gand's cake/pastry/muffin dessert show from several years ago.

I've made English toffee (think the inside of a Heath or Skor bar) many times before, so how difficult could peanut brittle possibly be? It came out perfectly! You don't even really need a candy thermometer, although you might want to use one the first time, so that you can gauge the color of the boiling syrup when it hits the right temperature.

Yield: a little less than an 11" x 17" jellyroll pan
Time: approx. 15 - 20 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1/2 c. water
• 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
  
• 2 c. sugar
• 1 c. light corn syrup
  
• 2 Tbs. butter
• 2 c. roasted peanuts
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• pinch of salt

Method:

1. mix the first four ingredients and bring them to a boil on medium heat
2. let the mixture boil, stirring occasionally, until it hits 340F (a rich, semi-dark caramel color in the pot, which looks lighter when it gets poured out); the original recipe said 10 minutes, but it took me closer to 20 minutes on my glass top stove, which regulates the heat level via timed on-off electric, rather than a steady adjustable gas flame
   
3. quickly stir in the butter until it melts, then stir in the other ingredients; it'll foam up like crazy, but that's fine
4. spread it out in a greased jelly roll pan, and smooth it out before it sets
5. when it cools completely, break it up into pieces, and store it in an airtight jar
   

Notes: The original recipe used salted peanuts, and unsalted butter, but I had salted butter and unsalted peanuts, so I added just a pinch of salt at the end. I did not add the 2 tsp. of ground cinnamon that the original recipe called for, because I wanted just a classic peanut brittle. As the mixture boils, you may need to stir down a few sugar crystals, if they start to form around the edge of the pot. At the end, you'll have to work fast, stirring in the last few ingredients, and spreading it out to cool, because once off the heat, it'll cool and start to harden pretty quickly. If you want, you can score the brittle with a knife or pizza cutter after you spread it out to cool, which will make it easier to break into neatly shaped pieces, but I sort of like it broken up into odd-shaped pieces of different sizes.