O, Christmas food!

Although the true feast--the Christ Mass--was held at Redeemer, we did a fair bit of feasting at home, too. In fact, it seems like cooking and eating have been the main occupation the last few days. We chose to ignore the well-meaning suggestions for lightening up our holiday food that Bethany found.

Instead the day of Christmas Eve started with orange rolls. Before dinner, during the afternoon, we had cheeses, and olives, and smoked oysters, and dates, various crackers and a couple of kinds of snack mix. For dinner we had a gorgeous, delicious, perfectly medium-rare standing rib roast, twice baked potatoes, carmelized brussels sprouts, salad, and herb yeast rolls. We had an Argentinian Bonarda that I bought over a year ago and had been saving for a perfect piece of beef. It was lovely, especially since we had excellent company in my mom and my Wicked! Dessert was cookies.

Today we had what has become our traditional Christmas day meal of chicken tetrazinni. It is a wonderful, rich recipe and perfect because I can make it ahead and just pop it into the oven after church. We had a salad, some roasted garlic bread and a french baguette. We opened an Oyster Bay Pinot Noir, but it was a big disappointment. It was thin, almost no legs, and its citrus notes were mostly reminiscent of slightly sour orange juice. So we finished up the ends of several other bottles.

I baked some more cookies this afternoon, because tomorrow we will celebrate with Colin's parents at their house. For supper tonight we had cold roast beef sandwiches. And of course the house if full of goodies: cookies, candy, toffee, nuts, snack mixes, egg nog....

For a bit more food, this for the mind and soul, check out Pastor Petersen's Christmas Eve sermon.

Government created angst

My friend Susan posted today about how uncertainty about what the government is doing and going to be doing makes making certain decisions difficult. This is so true, and one sure sign that our government is too big and too intrusive.

Random thoughts

Relatively pleased with the article that came from my interview last week with a reporter from the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. She was slightly wrong on Patrick's reading age, but I think it was more a matter of me not being clear as we were talking. But over all she seemed--unlike other reporters I've dealt with--not to have the story already written in her head. She didn't take my words and torture them to mean something different, or quote me out of context. She seemed to comprehend what I was saying, and she reported it accurately.

Was inside the new addition at Trinity English Lutheran yesterday. Wow. Aesthetically pleasing and maintained the integrity of the building. Very nice.

Spent the whole day shopping Saturday and only managed to add to my list.

There are a ton of bulletins to be printed between now and January 1.

Books, books, and more books

I'm planning my reading challenges for this year. I read a lot of books this year, but not as much quality as I would like. So, for 2010 I'm going to do a bit more brain-stretching. If you have suggestions, I'm talking about it here.