Cookaholics Bulletin Board

What are you all doing? Cooking? We're staying home tonight. I'm making roasted shrimp and CI's Spinach Salad with warm bacon dressing. I hoarded a few bites of the gravlax, so we'll finish that up with some pumpernickel toasts, sour cream and dill. Dessert? No idea yet.

trink.

Our Gourmet Dinner Club always gathers on New Years Eve....host is making a Tuscan stuffed pork roast. I am bringing a Plum Pudding and hard sauce. I found a Martha Stewart recipe that looked great. Odd how so many of the ingredients have become hard to find. Dried currants and candied peels were no where to be found. I went to every gourmet and chain grocer I could think of in Denver. One of the proprieters said she used to carry them when first opened, but there was not much call for them so they discontinued the products. I'm pretty sure if I had planned ahead I could have found them online. I substituted dried cranberries for the currants and candied ginger for the peels and added orange rinds grated. The proof will definitely be in the pudding tonight!
Happy New Year to you all
ilene

We will be off to our friends place in Sandpoint. I am bringing: freshly smoked salmon, Ina's crostini, a jar of my homedone dilled pickled beans, a bottle of Cliquot (that good stuff with the yellow label ), a bottle of cabernet. My hostess gift is a microplaner and some homemade apricot jalapeno conserve.

Dinner will be pork loin, and our other friend brought The Cake (a fabulous coconut multi layer cake using the recipe from Luna restaurant in Spokane).

We are all staying overnight, then walking the dogs in the AM (we usually ski but the weather is bad this year)...and we go back to the house for a brunch of scrambled eggs, spinich, lobster, black eyed peas, and more champagne. After sobering up with coffees we pack up the dog and drive home and start the New Year!!!

Happy New Year everybody!

I, for the first time am having people over for dinner tonight. Yikes.

Same thing we've done for 26 years -- just lobster and cream biscuits and salad and champagne. Lobster and cheerios in a bowl are the total extent of my DH's culinary ability and he made the lobster and champagne the first year we were married. No matter how the year turned out; this meal still ends things on a high note.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Dinner with friends, pork loin, pear salad, green beans, simple potatoes. Dessert from a friend...will be a surprise.

We are sitting here drinking tea and eating chips and salsa (at least it's homemade salsa). I'm too pooped to cook anything. We'll probably just eat leftover pot roast. Tomorrow I plan a big cooking/baking fest.

Good to hear from you, Darcie. We hope you're getting settled in, just in time for January in Minnesota.

After the rush that Thanksgiving always is, I persuaded Kathy that our NYE dinner (for 8) should be something that would be ready to serve whenever we'd be ready to eat it. So we had short ribs braised in red wine (derived from Cover & Bake) over mashed Yukon Gold potatoes. One guest brought appetizers, another salad, and another dessert. Lots of second helpings were taken.

Tomorrow is pork & sauerkraut for just the two of us. The smallest pork shoulder at the store was 8 pounds so we''ll probably do some portioning before it goes into the crock pot.

We stayed home and had a friend over. It was very casual; I made a huge roaster pan filled with stuffed cabbage, we had leftover Christmas cookies and I made my Aunt Lena's Roman apple cake, which is like a dense, bread pudding-like cake that Donna loves. It was a lovely and very relaxing evening.

The Plum Pudding was fabulous and received rave reviews. We only consumed half of it, so I am going to wrap it and store it in the basement and bring it out for New Year's Eve 2010....we'll see if mellowing for a year really makes it better.

Hope 2009 is better for everyone, not just the Plum Pudding
ilene