Christmas managed!

Touching down once more on the tarmac of real life after spending the last three days in a Christmas bubble, cooking, drinking, and watching blissfully endless episodes of the Gilmore Girls. Friday I left work and ran home and started prep for Saturday, shopping, picking up the filet mignon tenderloin I'd reserved from Fleisher's, making the applesauce and cranberry sauce. Next day, Christmas eve morning, up early, more shopping, and brought all the groceries over to mordicai and pravda's. Nobody else there yet but us three. We started Gilmore Girls. Season one, episode one. The setup: single mother Lorelai Victoria Gilmore and her daughter Lorelai "Rory" Leigh Gilmore living in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, located approximately thirty minutes from Hartford, Connecticut. It was on. I made some bread. Made an Irish onion soup (basically French onion soup with Irish cheeses and Evil Twin's Yin stout). Then ranai showed up. Then elladorian showed up. Finished up the ancillary dishes and then roasted the tenderloin like a boss, removing once and for all the thorn that's been irritating my paw since last Christmas's epic quail fail. Then James and Lilly dropped in and I had an incredibly hard time getting them to let me make them a plate. They'd brought a meat patty and were ... really insistent on eating it. I made them eat Christmas dinner.

Then it was into footie pyjamas and to bed. Then CHRISTMAS MORNING. pravda made fruit and yogurt parfaits that were ba-zerk, and then we opened presents. I got really incredible loot from all my friends. mordicai and pravda gave me/us, among other things, a book of scholarship on medieval porn, Settlers of Catan, and a Christmas-sweater t-shirt that I'm never going to take off. ranai gave me a hand-made cheese diary. Not even kidding. Hand made cheese diary. Maggie bought me new glasses. I actually succeeded in not brooding over why I had no presents to give anyone. I made a white bean and tarragon soup for lunch, and we played a game of Settlers of Catan (fun!). We kept watching Gilmore Girls right through the end of season one (A thousand yellow daisies!) and then it was time for the new Doctor Who Christmas special, it was time for me to start making bread pudding. We watched the special (it was pretty good! tho probably my least favorite Christmas Special of the series. David Morrissey as the Next Doctor still slays me.) Then it was over and we headed home.

I gotta say, I can't remember ever having had as stressless a cooking event as that. It was a lot of work, but at no point was I exasperated or scrambling, and, aside from a curdled Welsh rarebit (rabbit, ra-re-bit, rhhurrrrbit) that I happily declined to serve, everything worked out and tasted good I thought. Moreover I did it all according to plan and with remarkably little waste - a lot of the time with big cooking projects, in the aftermath the kitchen is full of products not entirely consumed in the preparation (oh look, I have this new bottle of hazelnut oil I only used one teaspoon of), but at the end of the weekend I think the only things I left behind were some fresh herbs and half a bag of garlic croutons.

BUT WAIT! There's more! Today, for St. Stephen's Day, it was the traditional dad's-side family Christmas celebration. Great to see the (almost, but not quite) whole family, drink and eat prodigiously, and laugh like imbeciles about all kinds of stuff. I drank some kind of Russian cherry liquer "traditionally made at home. for men." out of a bottle with a red hat on it. It tasted like Robitussin. It's a little nuts to contemplate the variety of liquors I've drank in the last four days, and their quantities.

And now, back down to Earth. Work. Work work work. I gotta say, I was hoping this weekend would recharge me a bit, but I still feel as burned out as I was feeling last week. I'm pretty tired of ... a lot of stuff relating to my job. But hey. Suck it up yo. You gots responsibilities.

#ggxmas