texan christmas

This year was the first year ever that I did not spend Christmas with my family, and this is the ruckus that I found - 

- from 0 degrees Celsius in Dallas the day we landed, to 28 degrees on Friday - hello up there, can you make up your mind on the weather?

- Republican bumper stickers like "YOUR WALLET - the only place Democrats want to drill", "SARAH!", and other interesting sayings countered by a few Obama/Biden ones around town.  My favourite was "Texan Democrat" - talk about oxymoron, haha

- Texan POV's such as "well if he (Obama) wants to take the guns away I'm going to make sure he doesn't take mine.  Otherwise only criminals will have guns and I can't let that happen..." on and on...

Continuing with the theme of oxymorons, we also had a very traditional British Christmas feast despite being in Texas!  (Lori, we used plenty of salt & pepper...you'd be proud of your heritage.)

Grandma making the best roasted potatoes!

Mr Helpful in PJ's all day until Christmas dinner

Brussels sprouts...yum yum

The silverware makes its annual appearance

They even have different colour themes for tree decorations in Texas ;)

Real trees in Texas cost about $400, hence the fake one!!

Lovely message left for us in the coach house

The turkey being roasted in the coach house

Merry Christmas!

2nd bi-annual christmas party

Alex and I have bi-annual Christmas parties.  Originally I thought maybe we'll start doing them annually after this year (last year was a disaster to begin with and the party got semi-hijacked to a different location, on a different date, with a different concept called pot-luck).  However, after the past week - see you all in 2010 peeps!!

I had a project plan for tasks to do every day of the week leading up to the party, as I believe firmly that if I'm opening the doors, I'd better treat my guests right and there's never too much enthusiasm.  The plans actually got put into motion in October when I ordered custom invitations from redstamp.com.  I'm obsessed with custom letterpress and stationery shops these days so I jumped on the opportunity to get these invitations made.  Two years ago I sourced shimmery champagne-coloured card stock and embossed the invitations myself, which took a long time, and gave me a hand cramp!

Anyway, this week has been full of baking, prepping, cooking, shopping at various specialty stores, procuring cheap(er) amaryllis, etc.  I followed the rule of 6-7 pieces of food per guest for the hors d'oeuvres, and since we invited at least 30 people, you can imagine the sheer volume of food passing through the kitchen this week.  I would basically be in the kitchen from the moment I got home until about midnight!!

The final menu included crab cakes, duck crepes, curry chicken purses, brie and cranberry spanakopita, veggies and chips with pan-fried onion dip, lamb bites with roasted red peppers, 4 mushroom tarts with truffles, cherry tomatoes stuffed with pesto on a skewer with bocconcini, smoked salmon with creme fraiche, and prosciutto with dijon mustard.  The desserts table included chocolate cups filled with fresh fruit, shortbread cookies dipped in chocolate, mini coconut cupcakes, chocolate chip skor bits cookies from allison, and gingerbread cookies!!  

The party started at 7:30 (Terence and gang arrived about 30 minutes earlier to help with last minute preparations as I was super stressed out and considered not doing my hair or makeup just to make sure everything was ready), and went on until 3:00am!!!!!  It was a smashing success and I think we had about 24 people show up despite the snow storm that hit last minute, and one of my guests had to be picked up with a garbage bag in hand, so I think we did very well!  We polished off 18.5 bottles of alcohol...although if everyone had read the instructions on the invite and brought a bottle of champagne, we would've gone through more I should think!!

Getting the bar ready - Julia was the barmaid for the evening

Main food table

Dessert table

Favours - Santa-hat-shaped cupcake pops

Not quite the whole picture of 18.5 empty bottles

Drunken self portrait at 3am

bake fest 2008

Julie and I have been talking about baking goodies and packing them up as care packages for Christmas to send to our mutual friends.  The idea started in 2006 when we wanted to send cookies to Vartan, Dave, and Logan.  So finally this year we organized a baking date, and I procured all sorts of materials and ingredients and got prepped for a day of baking goodness.

The baking ingredients (partial).  Not in photo: pre-mixed shortbread and chocolate chip cookie dough, and brownie and gingerbread cookie ingredients, plus the cookie cutters and other fun decorating things.

My oven turned on at about 3:30 and went straight through to 9:30, and we made superbly delicious gingerbread cookies (that Julie and Alex kept on stealing when I wasn't looking), my favourite chocolate chip cookies (from the NYTimes article), and amazing chocolate brownies, and countless shortbread figures that Julie decorated with gusto.  She even made a Blair Waldorf with a pearl headband, come on...

We packaged up the cookies in tins, bags, and these amazing boxes I found at Michael's.  By the way, Michael's is awesome - there's soooo much going on in there for fun things you can do, and these boxes were just a cute little example.  I ended up spending a little over an hour in there just browsing when I went in...haha.

If you don't feel Christmas-y yet, I hope the cookies help you get there!!!

12 days of Christmas

12 cookie boxes lined with tissue
11 days until i get on a plane
10 goodie bags with twine
9 bottles of sprinkles and dragees
8 lightly floured winter cookie cutters
7 types of goodies (shortbread, shortbread with chocolate, linzer, ginger molasses, chocolate chunk, peppermint meringues, brownies)
6 care packages to fill and mail
5 pounds of callebaut semi-sweet chocolate
4 pounds of unsalted butter
3 bags of icing in red, green, and white
2 mini gingerbread cookie cutters
1 very overwhelmed mango

see above for weekend plans.

buncha random thoughts

I can't quite start working yet even though I'm painfully aware that it's 9:44 already, and my three-page-long to-do list isn't getting any shorter. I think I just need to rant and get all these thoughts out of my head!

First of all - Christina got married! I was totally hoping to get to her wedding in Taipei as part of my trip to Taiwan in Q1, but there she went having a small ceremony with just family...congrats Christina! :)

My desktop background is a picture of Nyac the otter. The same picture can be found under my entries with the tag "otter". She was adorable!

Kasia got my package, which is great...I still owe the girl at the post office money for the bubble wrap stuff to hide the cookies in, I shall go pay her back some time tonight. She will obviously have no idea that I nicked two of those bubble wrap bags for my cookies but it's an honest thing to do to pay her back, right? I was desperate!

Trip to Taiwan - I need to start doing research! I think I want to swing by Bali for a week of sun and relaxation (and visit that healer from Eat, Pray, Love)! The thing is, everything looks kind of expensive right now so I have to do some more research to find cheaper alternatives and plan things a bit more DIY to save money. You're all invited to join me and Terence in Bali, by the way.

South Beach - I have been on it since Monday morning. I just woke up and decided it was time, and so far, I am incredibly glad I am doing it. My eating habits have gotten SO BAD. When I think about what I might've been eating if I weren't on South Beach, I cringe. I would've probably had a nice greasy English muffin with sausages and an egg for breakfast, had a soup and sandwich for lunch (which is probably the healthiest part of the day, usually), and snacked on Halloween candy from my coworkers, eaten lots of fruit (another semi-good thing) for the afternoon, binged on rice cakes or crackers as soon as I got home, eaten some sort of a dinner (not always healthy), and snacked on whatever else came my way, including anything I bake. For example, yesterday I went to Loblaws to buy some stuff because I'm having some coworkers over tonight. The old me would've cracked open the Pringles right there in the parking lot because I hadn't had dinner yet and was starving, and probably would've bought a Kinder Surprise or something to "tide me over". It's not that I was eating a lot in quantity, it's that I had absolutely NO filter and would just eat whatever was available around me - it's like I was constantly walking around in Costco waiting for samples to be thrown at me. That, my friends, is dangerous.

My naturopathic doctor (yes, I went back) did have a chat with me about the way I have been putting on weight, especially in the last year. As you may all have heard because I whine about it so much, my ass grew a healthy two inches in the last year, and I don't even want to think about how much my waist has grown. I never used to put on weight in my butt; if anything, my limbs were more likely to suffer in hard times (see pictures from beginning of third year after a summer of toast with my freshly churned, delicious butter in England). Anyway, he mentioned that in stressful times, your organs can't process fats as quickly and you tend to gain weight differently...so basically, the last year and a half have been stressful for me and that should explain the weight gain in awkward areas. It's kinda funny, because I really don't have overall complaints about my job and the type of work I do, and I never thought of it as stressful in a harmful way. I'm much happier than I was at my previous job, that's for sure.

Christmas party...I feel so disorganized this year. I think there's a bit of work to be done with decorations (will be starting this weekend - first official December weekend), and the menu planning is driving me bonkers in my head. I kind of know what I want to do, but it's so scattered in my brain and I feel like I need to be constantly jotting down things and ingredients to make sure I don't forget anything. I need to write myself a project plan!! Just need time to sit down and do that now...So many ideas in my head, so little time. Also, I take slight offense to people feeling like they need to bring food. I'm not sure why, other than maybe it interferes with my masterpiece slightly and goodness knows I can't have that. So if you're reading this, and you're coming to the party, please refrain from bringing food. Especially the store-bought saddo-looking type. Homemade food? I am open to discussion, but no promises.

Christmas presents - again, another drawn out list of the nonexistent presents this year. We've decided to go super small this year, so there's quite a bit of brainstorming going on, as well as supplies-procurement for those DIY gifts. I'm excited though, somehow living frugally thrills me a little bit because we had so much fun living frugally in England and forgetting about material goods for a whole summer. I find that my life was much simpler back then and thus more time to have fun and relax!

Anyway, ranting time is over and it's 2:40pm now - I guess I should get back to work ;)

Happy Birthday Jakub!

These cookies never made it to you because the colours spread and the bears didn't look so good the next day. So you got snowflakes instead. Sorry kid, to give you a reality check so early on in life :)