Lazy Wednesday & miso salad dressing

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IMG_5764

Tonight I had salad* and Rose** had pasta with butter and cheese.

*Delicious new dressing recipe!
**Yes, my daughter wears a leotard every day.

• Creamy Miso Salad Dressing •
1 tablespoon miso paste
1 tablespoon creme fraiche
1 teaspoon honey
1/3 cup plain, nonfat yogurt
1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine the miso and creme fraiche in a small bowl, using a fork blend until there are no miso lumps and the mixture is smooth. Add the honey and mix well. In another small bowl or pitcher, combine the yogurt and olive oil. Add the miso, creme fraiche and honey mixture to the yogurt and olive oil, stir to combine. Serve over hearty salad greens like spinach or baby kale. Roasted sweet potatoes, lentils and nuts go well with this dressing too.

New Year’s Day

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Happy 2013!

We spent the day packing up and heading home after a long and very nice visit to Boston. When we got home this evening, Shane was starving and ordered $45 worth of sushi. Rose wanted buttered pasta. I wanted nothing more than a huge salad. And so that’s what we had, three different dinners, eaten together of course.

I will post our New Year’s Eve dinner very soon.

New Years Eve

By in family, parties

We had a lovely New Years Eve with, my sisters, brother in law and new baby nephew. The boys wanted meat, I wanted caviar and Jenya is not eating dairy because of the baby’s milk protein allergy. With all that in mind, we set about to make a rather delicious meal.

Before dinner we stopped down the hill to have “appetizers” with our parents and friends. Rose impressed us all by eating three raw oysters.

When we got home, we had more appetizers. Roasted fingerling potatoes topped with smoked salmon, creme fraiche (and some without for Jenya), and golden caviar. We also had a lovely cocktail called a Rose Royale which was made with rose syrup, gin, champagne and a pomegranate seed garnish.

The meat was prime rib, which they cooked as shown here but using olive oil instead of butter. We made the roasted asparagus with lemon oregano aioli from this recipe. Instead of using jarred mayonnaise, we made our own, which took several attempts but came out great in the end.

Dinner was served with crusty bread and an arugula, roasted yellow beet and pomegranate seed salad with Rita’s dressing. We also had baked potatoes because the potato appetizer wasn’t enough potato for Shane.

My sister Anna had the brilliant idea of Baked Alaska for dessert. For the cake base, she used the Great Yellow Cake recipe from the New Basics Cookbook, which is dairy free. The ice cream was dairy-free chocolate peanut butter from JP Licks and it was excellent.

My parents joined us for cake and midnight, because their friends had started to fall asleep over at the “grown-ups” party.

Even though we had a bit of a hard time staying up ourselves, it was perfect to be with some of my favorite and most beloved people as we said goodbye to 2012 and hello to 13.

Shrimp cooked on a pink salt rock

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ShrimpOnSalt_IMG_5702My mom has a round pink slab of salty rock from Tibet. We heated it up on the range and then put it on the table and cooked our shrimp on it. It’s a bit of a slow process, definitely not for a large group, but a good bit of fun. The shrimp comes out salty and moist.

We also had lentils cooked with preserved limes, which gave them an interesting flavor that some of us liked, and some were not so sure about. Everything was complimented by a delicious Rita salad, with mixed greens, orange zest, pear, blueberries and orange dressing.

Rose decorated the dinner table with pink rose petals.

Salad, red rice, fish

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IMG_5652Tonight we had a lovely green salad, red rice and Cod fish cooked the Adriatic Way. Previously, I posted that Cod is not an appropriate fish to cook the Adriatic Way. Evidently, Cod is not appropriate for me to cook the Adriatic Way, my mom does it just fine.

Kourabiethes

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Somehow I neglected to mention the delicious, melt-in-your-mouth Kourabiethes we have for dessert every year at Christmas. Iris has made them for as long as I can remember, and is now helped by her daughter Johanna. Christmas would not be the same without them.

Beans

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Beans_IMG_5649Kids are funny the way they respond to breaks in their routine. Rose started to get a bit edgy today, and I wondered if it was being away from home and her normal day-to-day that was doing it. So when she asked for beans for dinner, I said yes. Having something familiar for dinner seemed to turn her mood right around.

I made the beans from this recipe but with my usual substitution of the white and light green parts of one leek, cooked with the garlic, used instead of the scallion. We had the beans with rice, corn tortillas and my version Ronni’s guacamole, which wasn’t nearly as good as hers.

My mom made the most delicious escarole ever. She sauteed it in oil with garlic until it was wilted, then added broth and cooked “the living daylights out of it,” and then at the end added a “slab” of butter. I’ll try it myself soon, and give you specifics if it works out.

Bouillabaisse and baby

By in left overs

Bouillabaisse_IMG_5633Tonight we had leftover bouillabaisse, among other Christmas leftovers, and an adorable baby boy on the table. The food was great, but the most delicious thing was the babe. Not a one of us could keep our eyes off of him.

Christmas

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How do I even begin to tell you about Christmas? I think the easiest way is by captioning the photos below, which I’ve done (click on the photos for a larger, slide show view). You’ll also need some background, so here goes.

We’ve celebrated every year, for 30 or so years, at my parent’s house. There are usually between 26 and 30 guests for a sit-down dinner. It’s a production that takes many willing participants, and days to pull off. And it is all orchestrated by my mom, who I think is amazing (and a little bit crazy). I could never do what she does.

My mom keeps books in which she records every holiday meal she hosts, and other special events. The books go back more than a decade, probably two. In each, she notes the guest list, and (often inaccurate) count. She draws out the seating chart, how the tables were arranged and in which room. She records the menu, with illustrations. And finally she makes notes about how Christmas went that year.

The notes are extensive, she talks about the menu, serving and seating, what worked and what didn’t. But she also notes the emotional tone of the holiday, why we all felt good or didn’t. Who we missed, or who was at Christmas for the first time.

In 2000, I brought Shane to Christmas for the first time and we started the tradition of Christmas Lottery. It is not a yankee swap. Shane and I buy one very big gift (such as an entire prosciutto) and a smaller gift that hints at what the big gift will be. At dinner, between courses, we hold a lottery drawing, to see who will win the gifts. Most years, the lottery numbers are somehow worked into the table setting.

The lottery has become a much anticipated source of entertainment at dinner over the past decade plus. We make kind of a hammy production of it. Since she was two months old, we’ve been incorporating our daughter, Rose, into the performance. The Lottery provides a welcome break between courses, and helps to pace the meal.

With that I leave you with the captioned photos below (click on the photos for a larger, slide show view). Merry Christmas!

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