Christmas dinner warm-up

For a pre-Christmas dinner test run, the wife is hosting another post-exam party for her fellow med school students. We’ve also started the monster task of our Christmas baking, so the kitchen has seen a lot of activity the past couple of days. It’s only going to get even busier from here on out.

My first attempt at nanaimo bars got off to a bit of a rocky, but very tasty start. Making it went ok, but when the wife wanted a variant without coconut, the second batch ended up not having enough graham crumbs for the amount of chocolate in the bottom part of the crust, so it turned out very chocolatey.

Then I screwed up the middle section, so had to disassemble the bars, scrape it off and re-do it. Then when it came time to cutting, the top chocolate layer ended up being not very cuttable, so the middle parts ended up getting squished out when I cut them into squares.

So they didn’t end up looking like much, but initial reports from the people at work that I shared them with were very good.

The first batch of spritzer cookies were finished yesterday. Only, oh about 5 more to go.
Then for the wife’s party of Friday, we’re making some greens, mac & cheese and roasting a turkey. Most of that will get started today. We usually do a pretty good job with the greens (I don’t eat them myself, but the people that do eat them have told me they’re very good). Starting with a good stock is important, and we usually make the greens with a homemade turkey stock. Yummy. Mac & cheese will be thrown together tonight for baking tomorrow, and the turkey will be brining overnight for roasting tomorrow.

All of this is just to get our cooking skills honed up for the arrival of the Horde next week.

On top of all that, we’re also heading out to go get the tree tonight. Looks like we’re going to get wet doing it too.