Christmas

I made eggnog from scratch once for a party, during college. It was positively amazing. It consisted of sugar, brandy, heavy cream, eggs and a pinch of nutmeg. It ought to have been called devil's nog. The stuff was pure evil! But tasty.

Sadly the eggnog you buy at the store is nothing like the eggnog I made. It's not fluffy and boozy, just cloying and thick. Every year I forget this and buy a quart. So this year after my first disappointing cup I decided to cook with it instead of drinking it. For years I've seen recipes for eggnog pancakes. But when I went to make them my printer wasn't working and I was too lazy to write down the ingredients. So I made up my own version. It turned out surprisingly good.

Eggnog is really not much different than a custard. You could use it in all sorts of recipes. You can make milkshakes out of it or use it in french toast, bread pudding, pot de creme, ice cream, and maybe even crepes. If you have a favorite use for leftover eggnog let me know about it.

Memories of holiday celebrations remain very food centric for me.  When I recall the roasts, turkeys and hams of holidays past, I am instantly transported to the chaos and love of the kitchens where those meals were affectionately prepared.

Christmas was always spent at my aunt and uncle’s home.  My brother and I could never wait to arrive there to play with our cousins, see all the new toys Santa delivered and for me, eat copious amounts of my aunt’s stuffed mushrooms.  These mushrooms somehow verified it was finally Christmas.  They were not fancy, just mushrooms with a piece of link sausage placed in the cap and baked to perfection.  I craved these mushrooms all year.  They would disappear within minutes of exiting the oven.

As we grew older the family increased and now boyfriends, girlfriends, new husbands and wives were also attending the holiday celebrations so the mushrooms would vanish at an even faster rate.  There were never enough of these little bites to meet the growing families’ demands and the competition to score a few was fierce.  I truly miss that.

From the L.A. Times

By Thanksgiving weekend, the prep work was well underway. All year long she'd been saving the boxes from stationery and from her nylon stockings, stashed with the Christmas ornaments. She'd made lists in her perfectly inscrutable handwriting. In our basement refrigerator, she had squirreled away some of the raspberry jam she made during the summer.

So every fall, when my mom told us that she'd grown tired of the whole idea of Christmas cookies and was giving them up, she didn't mean it. We were never sure, though. And we'd whine on cue, begging her to please at least make the kind we just couldn't live without -- for me, the Russian tea cakes, for my brother, the spice cookies called pepparkakor.

But most of her work went on in secret, while we were at school or after we'd gone to bed.

And by Christmas Eve, we'd have maybe 100 dozen cookies, as many as 20 varieties of exquisite, painstakingly formed cookies, stored in our freezer.

As a small child, bringing out box after box of cookies that morning was kind of a miracle. Not quite as wonderful as Santa, who would get a plate of them that night, but part of the blur of a holiday full of magic and surprise.

Read article...

It’s not easy being Jewish during the Christmas season, especially if you’re a kid. Chanukah is great, don’t get me wrong. Presents for eight nights in a row. Lighting the candles and watching them flicker in the menorah until they gradually fade away. And I’m a big fan of the latke. But compared to Christmas? Really?

Imagine, then, what my son Luke had to contend with, growing up Jewish and having an older brother who got to celebrate Chanukah and Christmas while he celebrated only the Festival of Lights. And it was all my fault. I married a non-Jew, had a son with him and got divorced. Then I met my true love (Luke’s father) and created our modern nuclear family. Three Jews and a mixed-breed (sorry, Craig), who marched in a Christmas pageant at his father’s church wearing the robe of a king – the same year he was deep in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Holiday time in our household was always a bit fraught.