Rachel here.

So, we're taking a break. Not a long one, but one long enough to nap after we eat holiday meals and long enough to allow time for the bloody mary's to wear off before we write to you again. We'll be back in 2012 with bells on (and a new fangled look, so get excited!) and we can't wait to see you all here then.

In the meantime, here's wishing you all a holiday season filled with love and happiness. Whether on the grandest of scales or tucked into the quietest of moments, we hope you find a little bit of sparkle to pocket away and carry forward into the new year with you.

There's a video on our Facebook page (ok, there will be...there should be...I'm trying to show technology who's boss and post it...I might fail...in which case, apologies in advance) that we'd love to share with you all (I couldn't figure out how to load it onto here...oh, technology you are a difficult mistress). It's our dear friend Caitlin being surprised by her parents (her mother is our occasional guest blogger, Susan...or, Our Lady of Fake It 'Til You Make It). I won't tell you any more. Click on over there and I dare you not to grin ear to ear or get a little misty eyed. I did both.

We send you love and full bellies, laughter and bear hugs. And we thank you--for gathering around this big blog table with us and sharing.

XO
R+J

Jammin' Jambalaya

Need to cook for a crowd and want to make something ahead of time? That's the way I prefer to cook when I have people over. That way I can actually enjoy my own gathering. I visit so many homes where the woman (because let's face it that is more often the case than not) disappears into the kitchen so much it's as if she's not there.

Not fair, say I. So cook ahead and sit right down to enjoy a festive holiday drink. (And if you're still seeking a special drink for this time of year, do check out our post last year on my husband's Cranberry Corker. It is killer good.)

On to the jambalaya

serves 6

ingredients
1 onion, diced
4 slices bacon, diced (I used turkey bacon but I'm sure the real thing is even lovelier)
1 pound shrimp, deveined and tails removed
hot pepper flakes and jalapeno flakes to taste. Start with 1/4 teaspoon and move from there
salt and pepper to taste
1 14-ounce can artichokes, drained and cut into quarters
3/4 cups large black olives, cut in half
1 cup rice
1 28-can diced tomatoes with juices
about 3 cups chicken or vegetable broth

method
In a large Dutch oven (large being at least 3 1/2 quarts, which I don't actually own so I had to start here and then transfer to a regular casserole dish later when I realized my miscalculation) heat a little olive oil and saute the onions and bacon together. (Is there a better smell in the universe?)

After about 6-8 minutes, when the bacon is getting crispy and the onions nice and translucent, add the pepper flakes. If you're a real heat fiend you could add a few splashes of hot sauce. Saute a few more minutes.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. The remove from heat, cover, and place in the oven. Bake, covered, for about 35-45 minutes. The timing is based on when the rice is nice and cooked. Serve with crusty bread and you are good to go.

Comfort Food

I really miss my mother. And I'm surprised. She's been dead, after all, for 11 years, and our relationship was a complicated one for sure. So I've been touching this rediscovered scab, thinking about how it feel when I scratch certain parts, and I think I've figured out where it's coming from: This is the first Christmas where Peter and I will not see two of our three children. At all. And for the first time, I understand and feel in my very core my mother. I get why she was so (often annoyingly to me) needy at different points — "What do you mean you're not going to spend Mother's Day with me, Janet?" — and why she seemed so desperate at others. She saw the clock ticking and like that Salvador Dali clock knew her time was melting, ever so quickly.

It's not a comfortable place. While I intellectually understand the passing of the baton to the next generation — embrace it even in my most independent moments – around the holidays I want to be surrounded by my children. I don't have taken care of aging adults, I am acutely aware of the few years (God willing) we will all have in this new realm as equals on some level, a time to discover and enjoy new relationships as our parent/child paradigm shifts into something else. As a new grandmother, I am aware as well of the snap-your-fingers-and-it's-gone time to share in our little M's life.

So I think of my mother. I want to tell her "I get it." But I can't of course. Instead, I decided to make a favorite meal of hers and mine. While it's not complicated — what was in the suburban cooking of the '60s? — it does requiring thinking ahead because the chicken marinates overnight. I've served this meal to my children a few times, always thinking of my mother and how happy I was whenever she announced that sour cream chicken was for dinner. For now, that will have to do.

Sour Cream Chicken
serves 4


Cover and marinate the chicken overnight in the refrigerator.

Heat oven to 325 degrees. Uncover and bake for about an hour until the chicken is done.

Ode to a Spatula

For years (or at least the two we've been writing this blog) I've lorded my lack of bona fide cooking equipment over Rachel. Yes, she of the gigantic, semi-professional KitchenAid stand mixer can make good pie crust, etc. but is she really sure it's not at least somewhat related to the equipment? I mean, could she really make tasty pie crust using a fork the way I do (badly I admit)? HA!

But since writing this blog and reading a ton of other cooking blogs and interviewing cookbook authors and reading more cookbooks than is probably normal (not to mention foodie magazines), I've got to admit I've been wondering if maybe, just maybe, having some equipment might be okay. I mean, do I really have to recreate the 19th century when I cook?

So last Christmas I asked Santa for — and received! — my little Cuisinart and I have been an electrical chopping wizard ever since. It is simply one of the best devices ever.

Which leads to my spatula ode. For decades, I stirred, sauteed, and scraped bowls with this spoon or one of its 5 siblings.


I didn't realize what I was missing until the day I decided to buy this little Sur La Table spatula last year. (Yes, last year. I bought my first spatula when I was 56.)

It was a life changer. Suddenly I could actually scrape a bowl clean. It was a minor miracle.

Until my birthday this year when I received THE spatula.


It is aptly called Spatulart because it really is a thing of beauty. Not having a handle means it's easier to manipulate, making scraping a bowl even easier. I could probably use this baby and make it look like the bowl hadn't even been used yet, it scrapes it so well. Added benefit? One side helpfully lists liquid measure equivalents while the other side lists dry. Can't remember (or more likely never knew) how many tablespoons are in an 1/8 cup? Not to worry. Spatulart has the answer. (two).

I am in love.

Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies

Rachel here.

So, Monday I promised you all the easiest cookie recipe of all time. Tucked among these...

And these...

Is this!

And no, it's not an address book. Or, you know, it IS, but it doesn't contain addresses. Instead, it contains recipes recorded by my great great aunt Eurania and given to my grandmother. My parents brought it out for me the last time they visited and I was ecstatic. Nothing quite says I-lived-through-the-depression like an address turned into a recipe book, does it?

It's a fascinating read, too. Filled with anecdotes (such as, This recipe has been Methodist tested and repeatedly approved...because, you know, Methodists are the measure of deliciousness or something like that) and jello salads, my southern great great auntie was a missionary on a mission to convince my grandmother of the wonders of the pecan. There are pecans in EVERYTHING, and pages of lists of other foods that would be well served by the addition of pecans. There's even a recipe from Eurania's grandmother (that would be my great great great grandmother...come on, how cool is that that I can cook something my great great great grandmother cooked? I'm totally geeking out over this) that I'm fixing to try just as soon as I recover from the amount of lard it requires.

But anyway, tucked among these pages of tidy script is a recipe for Snowball Cookies. I'm sure you've eaten these--they're round and rolled in powdered sugar and essentially are simple shortbread cookies with pecans added to them. Sometimes they're called Mexican Wedding Cookies. I'd probably call them that instead of Snowballs if my great great aunt didn't have such an awesomely unusual name. Mexican Wedding Cookie definitely sounds more exciting than Snowball Cookie, but nothing sounds more exciting than Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies. In fact, I think there should probably be an exclamation mark added at the end.

So now, without further ado, I present to you Great Great Aunt Eurania's Snowball Cookies!

Sorry I don't have a picture to offer of the cookie proper. They're umm...all gone.

Buckeyes And Other Baking

Rachel here.

So, we spent the better part of the weekend in the kitchen here in California. As you know, I've had some serious baking lurking in my to-do list. So, John and I rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

The first thing in the oven was Mjuk Pepparkakor. I accidentally put 5 tablespoons of cinnamon in instead of 5 teaspoons. Of course, I did this into a bowl that contained the final contents of our flour jar and, of course, I did this immediately after returning home from the grocery store.

Ummm...I burst into tears. And called my mom. And announced that Christmas was ruined. It was all totally prepubescent. It was also awesomely cathartic. I can't remember the last time I cried. Forget spilt milk--too much cinnamon is my undoing.

Things dramatically improved after that, though. We made fabulous snowball cookies (I'll post about those later this week, so stay tuned if you're even remotely interested in a cookie that's insanely easy to generate, isn't super sweet, and makes 4 dozen cookies that you can fit in your oven all at once...really, tune in; you'll thank me) and we adapted our own buckeyes recipe after reading 9000 others online that all seemed outlandishly sweet and completely un-mailable.

Evidently recipes that yield 4 dozen of something are my culinary rabbit's foot, because this buckeyes recipe did just that and so did the snowballs recipe and, just like that, I had boxes and tins and jars filled with treats for our friends and family, all brimming with things I think are completely and utterly delicious.

Leeks and Leaks

Janet here: No this isn't a homonym lesson. I'm just noting an interesting concurrence: the week in which I make a fantastic leek dish was also the week the light fixture in the bathroom at Casa de Roomie (I live in two places if you're not a regular reader) decided to become an unofficial shower as water streamed out of it one day just as I was about to head out the door to work. It was, obviously, an awesome moment.

But first some housekeeping. We are happy to announce the winners of our Blissful Bites cookbook giveaway: Carje, Vegan Wheekers and VegAn are going to be cooking up a vegan holiday storm, thanks to Christy Morgan and BenBella Books' generosity. We hope to get these in the mail ASAP but only Vegan Wheekers followed directions and left her email address so you other two need to contact us ASAP at lifetoldinrecipesatgmaildotcom so you can have an early Christmas present.

Anyway back to the leeks, which have become a bit of a vegetable fetish for me. First a confession: Until I started this blog with Rachel nearly 3 (!) years ago, I had never cooked a leek. Ever. It fell somewhere in with the thought process I had about shallots (also wildly wrong and uninformed), which goes like this: They're in the onion family, right, so really how different can they be in taste? I'll just use an onion.

That was a stupid thought process and when I think of how many years I missed eating leeks and (shallots), it makes me just a titch sad. It may also explain my using them, oh, at least once a week ever since and why I was inspired by a recipe from Not My Mother's Casseroles.

You might think a casserole made almost entirely of leeks would be boring or too much of a good thing. You would be wrong. This is savory and a wonderful side. And tonight the leftovers are going to be added to a little pasta with maybe a bit of sauteed broccoli and some grated Parmesan and I'm already salivating typing this. So make the casserole and then be happy you'll have some terrific leftovers too.

Lovely Leek Bake
serves 6-8

ingredients
6 large leeks
6 tablespoons butter
6 cloves garlic, minced
salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups white wine
1 cup broth
juice of half a lemon
1 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2-3 sprigs fresh thyme (leaves only)
1/2 cup bread crumbs (I used premade, but if you make your own, add some spices of your choice: garlic? a little more thyme?, more cheese?)


method
Grease 5-6 quart Dutch oven
Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Trim the ends off the leeks and cut each in half lengthwise. Wash well. Pat dry. Cut into half-moons about 1/2-inch wide.

Melt the butter in the Dutch oven. Cook the garlic for a few minutes until soft. Then add the leeks and stir/cook for about 10 minutes until they begin to get golden brown and soft. Add the wine and broth. Bring to a simmer.

Then take off the heat and squeeze in the lemon juice. Stir in one cup of the Parmesan.

Sprinkle the bread crumb topping over the leeks. If you're making your own, pulse all the ingredients in the food processor first before spreading. Sprinkle the 1/2 cup Parmesan over the top and drizzle a little olive oil over it all.

Bake for 25 minutes uncovered until the topping is golden brown.