Come oh come ye tea-thirsty restless ones -- the kettle boils, bubbles and sings, musically. ~ Rabindranath Tagore
Good evening, Kibitzers! For Christmas, we travel to the general area of Boston, to visit my brother and his family. Some years ago, we had a death in the family in December. The plan was to go ahead with "Christmas as usual", but we were all feeling pretty depressed, and there were just not enough of us to cheer each other up. I couldn't take over Christmas at someone else's house, and people tend to have their own things to do on Christmas anyway, so I decided to give a party the night before Christmas Eve, and invite all my brother's friends in the area that I also knew.
To do this, I stayed in a suites hotel with a kitchen and living room (in the now-something-else Summerfield Suites chain) and held the party there. People, I cannot endorse strongly enough having a party in a hotel. Sure, the decor may not be quite to your taste, but you start out with a clean place with no clutter and an empty fridge, and at the end you load the dishwasher, bag up the garbage, and leave the maid a really big tip, and lo! you have a clean place again, only with leftovers. (I would be unsurprised to learn that it's actually against the rules to have a party there, but my guests are relatively well-behaved geeks who don't stay too late and no one has ever complained.)
My mistake the first year was, I was thinking people would be busy and would drop by for an hour or two after work and then rush off, so I just did a little wine-and-cheese thing. But the guests showed no such inclination, and by ten o'clock there was not a speck of food or drink left in that room. I was delighted everyone wanted to stay, but horrified that I was out of refreshments, something that I was raised to understand is the ultimate hostess sin. In ensuing years as I've continued to host the party, I've made sure everyone can make dinner of the refreshments, as you'll see.
A cheap little fake tree and a few strings of lights festivize the room year after year.
Ham! A spiral-sliced ham, with a basket of rolls and some mayo and mustard, goes a long way toward making this be dinner. I love ham, so the fact that there are ample leftovers plus a hambone for soup is a feature in my book. It's pretty much work-free, too. The only trick is to work around whatever else you might want the oven for. It definitely won't fit in the hotel room's tiny microwave.
I put out crackers with the cheese, but people also put cheese on their ham sandwiches, so I always have some kind of cheddar and Swiss. That cheese in the back right is cranberry Wensleydale; I started serving it to amuse the many
Wallace & Gromit fans at the party, but it turned out to be good, so it keeps returning.
Mixed green salad with olive oil and balsamic, a little seasoning, and a sprinkle of toasted pine nuts. I couldn't fit a bigger bowl in the available space, so I would periodically toss a little more salad on the side and refill the hotel room's "big" bowl. I had bought the store's hugest box of salad and we went through all of it.
Beside it is some brie with fig jam, to add to the cheesefest.
I have one vegetarian who attends regularly, so there has to be a substantial food besides ham. Some years I make a pasta dish, but this year I made two square quiches, which I didn't allow to cool long enough before cutting them into squares, so they look kinda raggedy. They were good, though! One was mushrooms and peas, and the other was butternut squash with shallots and pine nuts (are you getting that I love pine nuts?)
Every year I make some little finger food, depending on what appeals to me at the time. In this case, I saw some boxes of tiny pre-baked phyllo shells and wanted to do something easy with them. So I mixed a tub of mascarpone with some thyme plus a spoonful of cream to loosen it up, put a bit of that in the bottom of each shell, and then added a spoonful of store-bought
caponata on top. Those are single rosemary leaves as garnish. The tarts were very tasty, quick to make, and required no oven time.
So, that was my menu, pretty much! I had grapes and mixed nuts out elsewhere in the room, and someone brought a kick-ass homemade salsa too. We had a
panettone for dessert later in the evening. It's a BYOB deal, so there was a wide assortment of beverages. (And someone was kind enough to take the recyclables home, so we didn't have to throw them out.) I love those people, I see them once a year, and I'm always so glad -- they're a lot of fun.
Anyone else, holiday food?
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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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