A Feast of Friends

Christmas is a lot of different things to different people — a celebration of the birth of Jesus for Christians and Catholics around the world, an orgy of consumerism for most Americans, a reason to eat Chinese food and go to the movies for Jews.

Der Weihnachten eve

Der Weihnachten eve

For me, like most holidays, it’s about food, family and friends. We had my wife’s family for dinner and presents Christmas eve, a tradition of theirs, celebrated this year at our house. I had enough to prepare for between Christmas dinner and our annual New Year’s Eve dinner, and might’ve done a stew or chili. But opted instead for a German dinner — homebaked rye bread, potato pancakes, house-fermented sauerkraut, spaetzle with roasted matsutake mushrooms and duck cracklings, duck confit, pan-grilled bratwurst and crispy duck breasts, paired nicely with a Swiss cheese fondue my sister-in-law, Laina, had made. More

The Beautiful Simplicity of Simplicity

I was making lunch for my wife and myself the other day, and had settled on a simple pasta. I had a nice heirloom pineapple tomato I needed to use, and would go from there.

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Ciriole di farro pasta with heirloom tomato

In the cupboard, I found an open box of ciriole di farro noodles (farro, for the uninitiated, is an ancient Roman grain related to barley) that would work beautifully as a canvas. More

Blogotism

It’s impossible to be objective when it comes to ourselves. Just in the way we can never know what other people see when they look at us, I sometimes wonder what other people must think of my blog.

Self-important-looking selfie

Self-important-looking selfie with painting

“Stand up straight, babe,” my wife will sometimes say to me.

I wonder if there’s a blog equivalent of not standing up straight. Are any of my sentences lazy? More

Gourmet

It was a lazyish Saturday afternoon, I was having a Sculpin IPA and preparing smoked ribeye sliders, Maui onion rings and a peach tart for my son’s intimate birthday celebration, when an email came in from my mother with the subject line, “gourmet”.

Gourmet July 1945

Finding no afternoon reading  inspiration in this book or that, she had dug up an old issue of Gourmet magazine. “By old,” she said, “I mean 1973.” She went on: More

Leftovers

For a lot of people, one of the best things about Thanksgiving is having leftovers. My stepfather loves to make sandwiches with leftover turkey and stuffing, which is just plain wrong in my opinion.

Turkey hand pie made with Thanksgiving leftovers

Turkey hand pie made with Thanksgiving leftovers

We received several invitations to “Leftover” dinners in the days after Thanksgiving. As I mentioned in my previous post, my friend, Vic, had the idea to do a gourmet-ish small plates dinner with Thanksgiving leftovers on Friday (which necessitated our regrets to a subsequent leftovers dinner invitation from our other friends, Bob and Shoba, for the same night). More

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