Happy New Year, 2009!

We had plans to go to a friend's house, about 35 minutes away, for an evening of board games and munchies. However, the snow that has been falling all day, and continues to fall, has made us opt for a quiet evening in, instead (unless things change dramatically).

Here's Seuss, the official Throwing Spoons cat, to wish you all a very happy and healthy New Year!

I can take a hint

I've now received five - count 'em, FIVE - cookbooks this Christmas.

Either word has gotten out that I like to cook, or someone's trying to tell me something...

Through the years, we all will be together

As I try to shake the cough that's been haunting me all week, I'm preparing to make Oreo Truffles for a party we're going to tomorrow, and then it's on to making food for our family party this coming Sunday.

I posted last year about hosting the first family Christmas party we'd had in a very long time. This party was for my mom's side of the family, which for a long time had TWO family parties. The first one, the Wilkins Party, was my grandmother and her three siblings and their kids. They'd go out to dinner the Saturday before Christmas, and then back to my grandparents' house for a Yankee Swap. When the grandchildren arrived, though, a new tradition was born in the form of the Crofts Party: my grandparents, their four kids and spouses, and grandchildren, and various other assorted relatives, would gather at my grandparents' for a potluck dinner and to exchange gifts.

When I was in my early twenties, I waged a campaign to include the grandchildren, if they so desired, at the Wilkins party. A few years after that, the parties merged into one big party. We'd go out to eat, and then have our Yankee Swap. However, Gramma Bonnie passed away in September 2000, and the tradition of the family Christmas party seemed to go with her. I think we might have had one or two without her, but somehow the tradition just evaporated. No one seemed inclined to have it out anywhere, and no one in the family had a large enough house to host it.

I've mentioned more than once how alike my grandmother and I are in some ways. One of the reasons we bought our home is because it's got plenty of room for entertaining. When it really hit me last year that the only time I was seeing my aunts and uncles and cousins was at family funerals, I decided to do something about it, so I sent invitations to "the whole fam-damily," as Gramma would have said. Bad weather kept some people away, but we had a great time.

It wasn't even Thanksgiving this year when the questions began: "Are you having the party again this year? When is it?" Seems like everyone else was missing it just as much as I was. So yes, we're having the party again, and the whole fam-damily is coming. Everyone is bringing something for the dinner, a silly Yankee Swap gift, and lots of hugs and "Do you remembers." It's just what Gramma would have wanted.

One of my contributions to dinner will be meatballs. I made five dozen of these for my class at school earlier this week, and they were gobbled up; I plan to make the same amount tomorrow, which is about three times the recipe I'm giving here. I used a medium sized scoop to form them fairly quickly and evenly, but you can certainly do it by hand.

Meatballs

1 pound lean ground beef
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
1/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 small onion, grated or finely chopped (about 1/4 cup)
1 large clove garlic, crushed (or about 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder)
1 large egg

Preheat oven to 400˚F.

Mix all ingredients. Shape mixture into approximately twenty 1 1/2" meatballs. Place in ungreased 9x13" baking pan, or on rack in broiler pan.

Bake uncovered 20 to 25 minutes, or until no longer pink in center and juice runs clear.

Merry Christmas, 2008

Merry Christmas to my readers who celebrate it along with me, and happy holidays to everyone else!

Santa was very good to the Throwing Spoons kitchen.  Among other things, I received:

a 6.5 quart cast iron Dutch oven; 

A two-burner griddle pan;

A universal double-boiler (no more setting a Pyrex bowl in my saucepan to melt chocolate for Oreo truffles!

The light-versions companion to my cooking Bible - woohoo! Can't wait to try some of these recipes.

A cookie press, with all kinds of fun disks, including a pumpkin. Christmas AND Halloween spritz cookies - woohoo!

Powerful

I intended to bake all weekend.  Last week, on an icy Thursday night, I was digging out my favorite Christmas cookie recipes, had my tins all lined up, ready to be filled, and went to bed with visions of sugar cookies dancing in my head.

Mother Nature had other ideas.

I woke up at 2:00 a.m. to a completely dark room.  No streetlights outside, no luminous numbers on my alarm clock.  I bumped my way downstairs to get my phone, set the alarm, and went back to bed.  It was noisy outside; lots of branches were breaking, sounding like gunshots.  I snuggled back under the covers, fairly certain that I'd get a call from my school snow chain saying that school was cancelled.

However, I awoke to my phone alarm at seven.  Looking outside, I was surprised.  It was icy, and we had a large pine tree down in the back yard; it looked like it had exploded about two-thirds of the way up.  I got ready for school, and headed out a little early.  I drove slowly on the slick roads, marveling at the ice and the downed trees.  I stopped at the Dunkin' Donuts next to school.  "I can't believe we have school today!" I said to the woman at the drive-through, and drove away.  

I turned the corner and put my signal on to turn into the school...but the gates were locked.  What the...?  Why hadn't I gotten a call?  "I guess we DON'T have school today," I sighed, and turned back.  I retraced my steps through the Dunkin' Donuts, where I picked up some coffee and a doughnut for my husband, and headed back home.

I arrived home to find my husband on his cell phone (the house phone was out, which explained why I never got my phone call), talking with his best friend.  They were trying to figure out the most likely place to find a generator.  When our power is out, our sump pump doesn't function.  No pump + wet weather = bad news at the Throwing Spoons headquarters.   The two of them began calling around; the closest store that had them in stock was about 45 minutes away.  My in-laws, being closer to the store, headed over to hosey a generator for us; I took off in Camilla, the Spoonsmobile.

I arrived at Costco to find my mother-in-law guarding a generator with her life.  They were checking on another model for her, but she wasn't letting that one go 'til she knew they had the other one for her.  They eventually brought it out, we checked out, and I hightailed it home.

I arrived not a moment too soon.  By the time my husband got the generator hooked up, we had four inches of water in our cellar.  We were a fraction of an inch from losing our water heater, and if the water level had risen another inch, we might have lost the furnace.  He managed to hook the furnace into the generator, so we had heat all weekend, and we had power for the fridge, and to charge our cell phones, and one light.  I pushed my luck with the toaster oven one night; otherwise I was confined to cooking on our gas stove.

I briefly considered mixing my cookies by hand, but I discovered that even if I did, baking was just not an option.  Though we have a gas range, the oven controls are electronic.  There was no way to light our oven, nor control the temperature.  I resorted to wrapping all of my Christmas gifts instead; baking will have to happen this weekend instead.

Our power came on early yesterday evening.  I went around the house, singing, turning lights on and off for the sheer fun of it.  I also have a theory that whomever first coined the phrase, "Silence is golden," must have lived with a gasoline-powered generator just outside the back of the house for five days.  It was lovely falling asleep to the sound of nothing.  Never before have I been so appreciative of our quiet neighborhood.

A special gift

My mum brought me a very special gift on Thanksgiving.

When I was little - and even not so little - my mum made dozens and dozens of spritz cookies at Christmastime, first with her cookie press, and then with her electric Super Shooter, which speeded up the process considerably.  She made three different shapes, and at least six dozen of each one.  My brother and I got to help decorate them.

There were green Christmas trees, which we sprinkled with multi-colored nonpareils, and carefully topped each one with a small silver dragée.  There were red bells or poinsettias - I think this varied depending on what plates she had for the particular press she was using - that were sprinkled with red sugar.  Then there were my favorites: wreaths, formed with the decorative tip.  The dough was white, but we sprinkled them with green sugar, and each had a red-hot cinnamon candy pressed on for a bow.  I always saved the piece with the candy as a last bite.

Mum hasn't made her spritz cookies in years, but I got to thinking about them recently, and I asked her if she still had the old Super Shooter.  When she arrived on Thanksgiving, she arrived bearing not only apple and pumpkin pies, but the Super Shooter as well.  I'm going to be trying it out very soon!