Early Christmas

So sad for all those affected by the shooting yesterday. Newtown, CT is only a couple of hours from Albany. It puts so many things in perspective.


With events of the past 48 hours in mind, this is only a short post about our early Christmas today. What with all the traveling (not together) we're doing over the next few weeks it was present time today.

Kitty got a nice new winter jumper. She's not that impressed though and walks with her belly on the ground when wearing it. It's very funny, will have to get a video soon.

Christmas Cat

It was Christmas pudding eating time! After steaming again for an hour it was ready to eat. As I had one big and one little, we made a tiered pudding!

Pudding!!

Poured Brandy over it and ready with fire...

Fire...

Flaming pudding (hard to see I know)...

... success!!

It was really good. Just like I hoped it would taste. I will 100 % be making this again next year.

We also had jigsaw puzzle completion this past week (after finding the last piece under the couch - I blame the cat).

Much harder than it looked

Thanksgiving 2012

It was nice to have such a long weekend, eat good food and take it easy. Here is the story of our thanksgiving feast. The success of the clams from last year meant we had steamer clams again! We had to request Price Chopper (our supermarket) get some in (which they were really nice about) so we had some nice fresh clams. I made two little loaves of white bread to go with the clams (which were cooked in a white wine garlic sauce). Yum!

Fresh homemade bread

Lunch

Instead of eating all the food in one sitting, we had clams at lunch time and then we had fish for the main course. Whole red snapper, which we roasted, jalapeño and cheddar cheese corn bread, lemon asparagus and mashed sweet potatoes with goats cheese and maple balsamic. All were delicious, including the fish, but I think the potatoes were my favorite!

Red snapper before the oven

Corn bread

Dinner time

For desert I (actually Matt made them) made my favorite pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (see the recipe here). They were as delicious as always and the silicone baking cups were very successful :-)

Muffins!!

I don't really remember what else we did apart from cook and eat on thanksgiving but it was successful nonetheless. We went black Friday the next day, but didn't do the crazy early thing - we got to the mall around 9.30/10 and still got some good deals.

The holidays are here :-)