Holiday Round-Up

Lots of adventures this December.

A week and a half ago I overrode my powerful compulsion to follow the rules and pulled my children out of school on a Monday. Instead of taking a math test (still feel guilty, but she did fine on it), Joy joined the rest of us and some treasured friends for a train ride into New York City.

Larry, Dawn, Dara, and Jocelyn came up the night before and stayed at our house. (I pirated some of these pics from Larry's facebook album...thanks!) Instead of riding the train from near our house (which would have been much easier but STUPID expensive), we drove into Jersey City, parked at the in-laws' church, and took the PATH train into New York at $1.75 a head. We are either smart or very cheap. Probably a little of both.



We had a great time, and despite Dawn's very earnest concerns, none of us came home with bedbugs from the train. To my knowledge, at least. I suppose they could be lurking in dark corners of our home, plotting a coup.


We ate at a fun, local-feeling dinery-type place. (Hamburger Heaven, I think?) Wide variety, good quality, thick sandwiches, sky-high prices, so...pretty much authentic New York.


We hit the American Girl store, where Joy, to her immense delight, used some Christmas money to acquire a nightgown that matches her Kit doll's. Afterward, we visited the tree at Rockefeller center and the Nintendo store, then rounded out the afternoon with snacks from street vendors (Will got a pretzel the size of his head) and photos with randomly-appearing characters.





Elmo and Spongebob and Mickey waved us over, posed for photos with us, then shook their money bags in our faces until we gave them some cash. Jack was apparently on to their scheme before we were...as soon as he saw Elmo (whom he adores), he burst into fits of terrified screaming. I should pay more attention to his instincts.

We made it home before everyone descended into complete meltdown mode, so I'm calling it a victory!

The NYC train trip was on my list b/c we live SO close to the city but rarely go in. It's intimidating, at least for me...expensive and a hassle and potentially dangerous. But I don't want them growing up without memories of experiencing New York. So I'm trying to be braver. See me being braver? :)

Later that week Will had his Christmas program at school. He was Joseph in their little nativity, which: love it. I don't have pics but am hoping Mark does. When he gets home I'll ask. I stayed home b/c Jack had a fever and a chesty cough, but I was supposed to send finger food, so I made these spinachy things.



Apparently they were a huge hit...Mark reports that the teachers started asking around the crowd trying to find out who made them. I told him he should have taken credit for them, but he probably couldn't have pulled that off. Endearingly, he is a terrible liar.

The recipe was a good starting point but seemed like it would be a little bland, so I sauteed the onion in a little butter, added the spinach, and spiced it up with some salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Red pepper would have been good, but I didn't have any. I spread it on the dough with the cheese and a few slices of ham, then baked as directed.

Crafts: We recycled some Christmas cards from the last couple of years and made them into Thank You notes for this year's gifts. Now I need to make sure we USE them. I am notoriously terrible at this and am in imminent danger of passing the problem on to the next generation. Time to break the cycle.




OK, I'm calling the next one a craft, though it's probably really a recipe. Maybe a project? We'll say it's a project and count it as a craft. We had a blizzard here last weekend, and at my friend Melissa's suggestion we put a big bowl out to collect some snow. It was kind of hilarious, actually...we put the bowl on the deck, where it got COMPLETELY buried beneath like 18 inches of snow. Joy dug around and eventually found it the next day and brought it in. We added milk, sugar, and vanilla, and it made something like a slushy ice cream. Lots of recipes for this online.



The kids loved it. I could take it or leave it. It was sweet and nice, but it really did taste like snow still...hard to describe. Also, Haagen Dasz is significantly less likely to have pine needles in it. They were so into it, though, that I suspect it will become a tradition.

I may be forgetting something, but that's all I have pics for, so that's all you're getting now. :)

The next year promises to hold all sorts of goodness and comfort-zone stretching as I work through the rest of this list. I'm excited about 2011. Hope you are, too. Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve Brunch (or, Too Many Cinnamon Rolls)

Last year I didn't really eat during the holidays. I was right in the middle of some really serious weight loss, and I wasn't willing to compromise my goals. This year, apparently my goals were compromisable. :)

We had Mark's family here for Christmas Eve. Since everyone had the whole day off, we did a big brunch in the morning instead of a big dinner in the afternoon for the following reasons:

• I'm totally intimidated by centering a whole meal around a big, expensive piece of meat which I may or may not scorch beyond recognition.
• I like the idea of having the whole shebang cleaned up and done by early afternoon.
• Cinnamon rolls.

So, in order to offset the informality of the whole brunch thing, I planned a menu that was a little bit of overkill, even for me. (The need to cook twice as much food as is needed for an event is a genetic abnormality inherited from my mother's side of the family.) We had a potato/sausage/egg casserole, homemade cinnamon rolls, chocolate-filled puff pastries, three kinds of sausages, "green top" (a jello-ey thing that's a tradition for us), croissants, a citrus salad dressed with a lime syrup, and...I think I'm forgetting something, but you get the idea.

Oh, punch. The punch was terrible. The rest rocked.

Several items were new recipes. I got photos of most of them despite the chaos--are you proud of me?

Cinnamon Rolls: These were sort of the centerpiece of the meal. I found a pretty good recipe on allrecipes.com, then did a little modifying. Instead of the oil I used 1/2 cup melted butter, and I added some cinnamon and 1/4 c sugar to the dough with the flour. I frosted them with the famous vanilla buttercream that I learned while making cupcakes for our friends Dave and Monica's wedding. It's, like, magic frosting. But that's worth its own post. For now, here's how the rolls looked.




Petits Pains au Chocolate: These were both fancy-sounding and fancy-looking but were almost embarrasingly easy. And the recipe actually came from a site that is NOT allrecipes.com, proving that I am not in a complete rut. However, believe it or not, I found that 1/6 of a chocolate bar was too much chocolate for these. Instead of 3 squares of the Cadbury bars I had, I used 2 squares per pastry. They were a hit.



Citrus Salad with Lime: I didn't get a picture of this one, which is a shame, because it was really pretty. I sectioned 5 lbs of navel oranges and 2 grapefruits (which took FOREVER--praise the Lord I did it the day before), mixed in some fresh raspberries, and tossed it with the lime stuff from yet another foodie website. Would have looked even nicer with a few sprigs of mint or something, but we don't generally swing that way around here. (Mark: "Why is there foliage on my oranges?")

Orange Cake: This was the sleeper hit of the meal. Honestly, I only made the thing because I own a bundt pan I'd never used. (Also the compulsion to cook in ridiculous excess, but we've covered that.) And I like orange. That's it. But the recipe is really easy, and everyone loved it. LOVED it. There was a discussion afterwards about whether it outshone the cinnamon rolls, which is saying something.

I actually used vanilla pudding instead of lemon, since some of the reviewers said the cake tasted more lemon than orange, but I did add some fresh lemon juice to the glaze to increase the tartness. (I LOVE citrus flavors, but I like them TART...like, just south of where you cross over from "mmm...orangey" to "this reminds me of some kind of industrial floor cleaner.") Honestly, even with the modifications the glaze wasn't quite tart enough for me. Also, I poured it when it was too hot, I think, so it didn't crust up at all. For a little visual interest, then, I piped on some frosting (basic vanilla, from Betty Crocker) that I was using on gingerbread men.

There were 6 adults and 5 children eating this stuff (and one of the kids was 3 weeks old, so he didn't eat many cinnamon rolls). You might not be surprised that we had a ton of leftovers. And they held up really well. The thing is, when your fridge has cinnamon rolls in it, it's hard to eat whole wheat toast and yogurt for breakfast.

Lesson learned this year: When I was 100 pounds overweight, a few holiday pounds were a drop in the bucket, but at my present weight I'm learning what all the fuss has been about. My pants are definitely a little tight. So here's what I think: it's Christmas. The cinnamon rolls were worth it. And I lost it once, so I'm pretty sure I can lose it again, and then pick up where I left off.

I have more to cover...we did our train ride into the city, we've had some new crafts, and there's one thing which might be a recipe or might be a craft. Undetermined. But the baby is screaming and is apparently not going back to sleep. (He and I have some philosophical differences when it comes to napping.) Also, I have a houseful of kids demanding a snack with increasing fervor. Until later, then...

Merry Christmas

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
Fall on your knees!
Oh, hear the angel voices!
Oh, night divine--
Oh, night when Christ was born!

I'll catch up here soon, but tonight I just wanted to say Merry Christmas. May His joy be the source of all of yours.

G-men

OK, people. Christmas craziness has descended. I spent all last week at the piano, and I'm paying the price now. But I'm really behind in updating this thing, so I'm going to toss a few pics up here while my puff pastry thaws. There will be less witty banter. Sorry. :)

We did gingerbread men last week. It's not a new recipe, but I'm counting it as a craft. That's legit, right? Even though it's food?


I'm a little sad that I didn't get a photo of the cute apron Joy was wearing. However, we do own the thing, so I suppose I could rectify that later. She did really great.




I reiterate my earlier comment that gingerbread fills the house with aromatic awesomeness. Mark's not a huge fan of the cookies themselves, but even he has no complaints about the warm, yummy holiday smells.





The decorating was the most fun, and where I'm able to justify the "craft" designation. Joy made some classic gingerbread men...

And a gingerbread girl...

Here's my take, at her request, on a gingerbread princess...

And a robot with an Autobot-symbol head for my Transformer-crazy William...

Will also requested a gingerbread man in his underwear. I rolled my eyes but secretly thought this was awesome.

In the end, they were both fun-looking and yummy.


So great, in fact, that now that they're gone I'm getting ready to roll out another batch for Christmas Eve. I'm planning to set the kids on the task of decorating them tomorrow morning while I'm getting our big brunch out. More on that later, I'm sure...

OK, back to puff pastry! Later, all...

the Tea Bar

You have to understand, first of all, that I was a hairbrush singer. At 4 years old I used to sit by myself in our living room, dressed in a white (night)gown and red ribbon and cowboy hat, singing Olivia Newton John hits to an imaginary audience, crooning meaningfully into a hairbrush. The brush disappeared by middle school, but only because I'd gotten good enough at the piano to accompany myself, so my hands were busy. I was entranced by the power of music--particularly a great love song or sad showtune--and spent hours at the piano, imagining myself passing on the power of those songs to various crowds.

When I was practicing for the talent show I sang in last April (for which I did not play), I deliberately did not use a hairbrush. I'm too grown-up for that now.

Besides, a lint brush works just as well.

So I'm not going to pretend that I don't love performing just for performance's sake. And I'm not going to try to play it cool about this Tea Bar thing. (Playing it cool is not a strength of mine, anyway--at least not when it comes to music.) I've been wanting to do this, without exaggeration, nearly all of my life.

That's what motivated the improbable beginning of this adventure to begin with. I ran across a posting on Craigslist where the owner of a new cafe in Fort Lee (about 45 minutes north of here, at the foot of the George Washington Bridge) was asking for musicians willing to provide live music. He wasn't able to pay you, he said, but he'd feed you. I was intrigued, so I emailed him, but I never heard back.

A couple of weeks later I had a birthday. (I turned 39. Have you heard?) Mark took me out to dinner, and the unwritten bylaws of birthdays decreed that I could invoke whatever harebrained plan I wanted, and he pretty much had to acquiesce. So I asked if we could wander around Fort Lee (to which I had maybe never actually been?) and look for this new cafe. For which I had no address. And no name.

Clearly I know how to party.

But we FOUND the thing. There's more to the story, but skipping ahead a couple of weeks and a few chapters, I ended up booked to do a solo gig there last Friday night.

The singing intimidated me not at all. The singing is like breathing...not because I'm that amazing, but because I've been doing it since I could talk, and it just is what it is. The PLAYING scared me. But I've been making a conscious effort to be brave lately, so I gave it a shot.

I had a total of two viable songs for which I had already worked up a piano part. I figured to be safe I needed about thirty. So I spent the next few weeks (less, really) courting a repetitive stress injury, parked at the piano, narrowing down the long list of songs that I love down to thirty that I could learn to play in short order.

It was a race to the finish line in which I surrendered four days at the gym (which hasn't happened in over a year) and accumulated an enormous mountain of laundry, but I made it. And Friday night I found myself opening the door of the Tea Bar and looking at this:

Kind of surreal.

I should acknowledge here that this is not a big place. It's really cute, and it has good food, and it's well worth checking out, but Carnegie Hall it is not. I'm aware that this was not a concert in a big venue with a grand piano. Also, there weren't many people there. But it didn't matter. For me, it was all about the music.

Once I got into the groove of the thing, it was like everything around me sort of faded into the background. Like my own personal open mic, my chance to take every beautiful song I'd brought and pour my heart into it.

Do you know that line from Chariots of Fire? The one where Eric Liddell is talking to...maybe his sister, when she's challenging him about why he's running? He says something like, "God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure."

Singing has become like that for me. I'm not going to be winning the musical equivalent of gold medals, but for whatever reason and to whatever degree, God has wired me this way. He gave me some ability and a deep, deep love for singing. And when I do it, whether it's in my kitchen or at a worship team rehearsal or in a half-empty tea bar, I feel joyful and peaceful and more completely myself. It's like something inside me settles in and begins to glow.

I sang jazz standards, pop songs, worship songs, Christmas carols, showtunes...pretty much the whole gamut. And it was FUN. Three and a half hours of heady, giddy, soulful-as-this-white-girl-gets fun.

The owner was very kindly complimentary and wants me to make plans to come back once a month. Yeah, that's not going to happen. My laundry pile can't handle it. But I'd for sure do it again, especially if I can convince a couple of the really excellent musicians with whom I'm blessed enough to be friends to come with me.

I won't lie...I wouldn't hate having a bigger audience next time. There's something about art that requires a recipient in order to make it fully realized. But even if the only ones really listening are my husband and my Heavenly Father, I'm there.

What an adventure.

So tired, but...

...just wanted to state for the record that I did it. !!!!! I was the evening's live entertainment at the Tea Bar in Fort Lee. For THREE AND A HALF HOURS. My throat hurts and my head is pounding, but I had the time of my life. I would do it again in half a heartbeat. But not right this minute. I'm completely done...the only things in my immediate future are ibuprofen and bed. Details to follow soon, I promise.

Lots of Latkes

Ethnically speaking, I have no right to make latkes. I am less Jewish than ham on white bread with mayonnaise. The thing is, though...latkes are delightful. I haven't made them in forever, and frankly, I've never made good ones. (Go figure...) So tonight, we had latkes from a new recipe, which turned out [insert Yiddish word for delicious].

In my defense:

• I grew up in a community with lots of Jewish people, and most of my childhood friends were Jewish.

• I am from New Jersey and am uppity about bagels and knishes.

• I have watched both Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl.

I suspect that these mitigating factors do not outweigh the fact that I cannot bring myself to eat lox, and that I...you know, worship Jesus Christ. However, the Bible teaches that I have the amazing privilege (I'm not being glib--it's amazing) of having been grafted into Israel when I gave my life to the Jewish Messiah. By faith I'm going to assume that that privilege extends to cuisine.

So here we go. Recipe #6.

The only potato pancake recipe in my 21st-birthday-present-well-used Betty Crocker cookbook is for a giant pancake that you cook all at once and cut into wedges. Meh. There's very little opportunity for crispiness there, and it takes more skill than I can muster to make sure the middle is cooked but the outside isn't burned. Whichever side you err on: blech.

Turning to the world wide interweb tonight, however, I found a great recipe and, even better, an accompanying "tips" sheet from someone who used to work at the diner where the pancakes were made! These little gems were apparently made by someone named Bette whose husband used to eat them in Germany. No word on their religion. But I have to tell you--if I were Jewish, I wouldn't mind claiming these.

It took me a long time to get started with this, as I've never used the grating attachment for my food processor. Finding it (and subsequently learning how to make it work) almost led to a meltdown and an invocation of the Pizza Clause. (Pizza Clause: a provision in our marriage agreement that states that if a new dish is attempted and failed, or if other culinary misadventures cause extreme frustration, pizza can be ordered by any involved party without guilt.) I did manage to figure out the technology, though, and eventually these pretty little numbers made it to the table.





The recipe made just enough for the 5 of us, since the kids ate them (!!!!!!!!) but not ravenously. Not really "Lots of Latkes," I guess, but "An Adequate Number of Latkes" doesn't have quite the same ring.

I served them with warm applesauce spiced with cinnamon (which I told the kids about) and some instant mulling spice (knowledge of which would just frighten them needlessly). The batter (?) was pretty dry, though it kept puddling up with potato juice, necessitating more and more squeezing-dry of the mixture as it went in the pan. But when I followed the instructions and tips, it led to crispy-on-the-outside, soft-in-the center, salty goodness. The applesauce, bottled though it was, made it even better. I'm going to try them with homemade sauce the next time we pick apples. The only thing it was pretty seriously lacking was sour cream, which...I forgot at the store. If you're making these, remember the sour cream.

They took a little longer than I anticipated (even if you don't count the food processor debacle), but they were worth it, and now they're cleaned up and the kids are in bed and the house still smells warm and homey.

I'm a few days late for Hanukkah, but they were great anyway.

I'm going to put in a couple of hours at the piano. L'Chaim, everybody.

Publicity Photo

I have a publicity photo.

I'm not sure what to think about that statement...just now I had to sit here and consider the idea for a minute...but there you have it.

I just sent this to the guy who owns the Tea Bar in Fort Lee. I'm going to be singing there a week from tonight. That makes me nauseous all over again, but I'm really excited, too.

A very helpful and talented friend took some photos of our family (there's one on my "about me" page) and of me in November. I put my name on one of them and sent it to Mr. Tea Bar about three minutes ago.



You'll have to let me know what you think.

In other news, my husband, who heroically and singlehandedly battled the puddles forming around our house all week as his entire family navigated this stomach virus, has finally succumbed to it. He's lying upstairs with a bucket next to the bed. I'm going to need to come up with something really, really great to reward him for this week.

One further bummer...the kids just left for a weekend at their grandparents'. We were supposed to have some kind of big date tonight. Stink.

I think I may decorate the house for Christmas instead, and then park myself at the piano until their return, but if that's going to happen I need to get on it. Hope you're all warm and germ-free...

Let it Snow

The other two kids got the bug last night, so it's been a vomity kind of day. I think everyone's over the worst of it, though, so we tried to stave off boredom (and the constant glow of the TV) by trying some snowflakes made out of coffee filters and muffin cup liners. They're hanging on the dining room wall.

I took some pics of the kids, but I was having trouble with some of the photos of the snowflakes themselves until I eventually...get this...turned off the flash.

I know. Madness.

My camera is supposed to know when to use a flash, right? Apparently it's a little overzealous (possibly pointing to a conspiracy with the AA battery people), because when I turned it off I got a few really pretty shots. This may be as creative as I ever get with a camera, so enjoy.








That's craft #3. Only 37 more to go. This is going to be harder than the recipes.