holiday baking

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Bit of Housekeeping, Cheesecake This Week and Also Dinners I Guess

It is the final week of NaBloPoMo, and I am still writing every day over at A Novel Project. Once the calendar flips over to December, I will probably not continue to write there daily, and instead find some sort of mix between writing about book topics (there) and other nonsense (here). One of the things I’m working on for this blog is my somehow now annual Holiday Gift Guide. Pretend shopping for a hundred more things than I need is way more fun than actual shopping, and I do love a gift guide. Unfortunately, there is no way it’s going to be complete by Black Friday, so if you are in need of immediate gift ideas, you may want to check out Swistle’s recent line up. Or you can visit my list of bookish suggestions. And I have many, many posts full of potential gifts you can revisit here.

Okay, now onto food, which is, of course, always at the top of my mind. 

Foremost in my thoughts is cheesecake.

Cheesecake Chat

I have been tasked with bringing dessert to Thanksgiving with my parents, and I have decided on cheesecake. My husband would love for the cheesecake to be pumpkin in flavor, or at least in appearance. I, however, do not much care for pumpkin and would prefer my cheesecake be unadulterated; I believe that my father and child might share this preference. We have come to a truce in the form of a pumpkin caramel. This recipe looks doable, if not exactly easy (what caramel is easy, I ask you?). Or, I could go the easiest route of all and order a jar of pumpkin caramel!

I see that I have completely avoided the actual foundation for all this caramel, which is, of course, the cheesecake. 

Tierney mentioned the two-layer cheesecake with a sweetened sour cream layer on top, and I realized a) I haven’t had that kind of cheesecake in a very long time and b) I really ENJOYED that kind of cheesecake. Tierney linked to an untested recipe, and I also found a recipe in my battered copy of Joy of Cooking. But I’m unwilling to go with the untested version and the JoC version is so much smaller than anything else… Like, I found a recipe for New York Cheesecake in my America’s Test Kitchen cookbook, and it has pretty near TRIPLE the amounts of all the ingredients that the JoC recipe calls for. They both use the same 9 inch springform pan. They both supposedly produce 12 servings. And yet I don’t know how that’s possible. 

Which is a long winded way of saying, I think I will just be going with the Test Kitchen version this year. For a few minutes, I contemplated making the Test Kitchen cheesecake and topping it with the JoC sour cream layer… but I have only made cheesecake a couple of times (and one of those times was a Basque cheesecake), so I’m not sure I have the skill or experience needed to Frankenstein two recipes together. Maybe later on in my cheesecake journey. 

Dinners This Week

Ah yes, onto everybody’s favorite time: planning meals. Here in the U.S., Thursday’s meal is most likely spoken for as it’s the day we celebrate Thanksgiving. My family and I will be at my parents’ house, where they are making my mom’s traditional garlic goat cheese mashed potatoes, sausage stuffing dressing, gravy, spinach salad, and – a Thanksgiving first (for us) – beef Wellington.

But we do need to eat the rest of the week, so here’s what I have planned.

Dinners for the Week of November 24-30

  • Roasted Chicken and Potatoes with Sauteed Green Beans: Everything I need for this meal is already in my house. The green beans are frozen garlic shitake green beans from Trader Joe’s. I have some potatoes leftover from pot roast the other week, so I’ll quarter those and shove them in with the chicken. I plan to marinate the chicken in this marinade.
  • Roasted Teriyaki Salmon and Spicy Zucchini Noodles: My husband will eat a leftover chicken breast instead of salmon, my kid will eat edamame instead of zucchini, and we’ll probably have some brown rice on the side.
  • Turkey, Sweet Potatoes, and Leftovers: My husband and daughter are a teeny bit bummed that our Thanksgiving meal isn’t going to involve turkey. Mom, if you are reading this: I AM NOT BUMMED, I AM ECSTATIC. I DO NOT LIKE TURKEY. They are both going to be delighted by the beef Wellington, I have no doubt, but this weekend I am going to buy a pre-made turkey breast and whip up a miniature portion of our traditional mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows so they can get their fix. I will also make a batch of homemade cranberry sauce for my kid, who loves cranberry sauce. Oooh! I should do this in advance and bring some to put on the cheesecake, for those of us who dislike pumpkin! 

P.S. I did make the lemongrass chicken stir fry last week, with my squeeze tube of lemongrass, and it was a big ol’ meh. I didn’t think it had a whole lot of flavor, but maybe lemongrass is just milder than I expected? If you have any recipes that call for lemongrass, please share them because I have most of this enormous tube leftover.

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Grump Update, Cat Trauma, Holidays, Dinners This Week

Let’s see. I have quite possibly gotten over my end-of-summer crankiness (although I reserve the right to revert at any time). Maybe I am even, a teeny tiny bit, getting into the idea of fall???? My kid is feeling better. My husband is now sick. I have a scratchy throat and am wondering why I thought having covid would be protective against whatever non-covid illness Carla had. 

What else? The cat had a traumatic experience: my husband accidentally set off the burglar alarm when he left the house the other day, and no one was home. This reminds me of the time when my housekeeper accidentally set off the burglar alarm while I was dropping Carla off at school. I had no idea until the alarm company called to ask me what was up. When I got home, ten-ish minutes later, our poor sweet housekeeper was still shaking. And she was a HUMAN who presumably understood what was going on. The cat is a CAT and, based on the blank but searching stare he gives me whenever I try to talk to him, he does not understand a lick of English. Carla and I came home to the cat hiding under my bed, which seems to have become his Place of Refuge. (My husband accidentally knocked over a chair the cat was sitting on while Carla and I were out of town, and the cat sought Refuge under our bed and my husband endured several worried hours where the cat remained entrenched under the bed; he had to resort to poking him with a broom.) No one can reach him under the bed unless a broom is called to service; very safe. Carla sat in my room with him, tempting him with treats, for three hours until he decided to grace her with his presence. He seems fine now. 

I would like to make a change to how we celebrate holidays here in the United States (and possibly elsewhere; I know nothing). Instead of celebrating holidays on a specific date, I want to switch to celebrating holidays on the nearest Monday or Friday to that particular holiday. You know – the way we do Election Day on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November or Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. These are imperfect examples, though, because they are Tuesdays and Thursdays and I want ALL HOLIDAYS to take place on Monday or Friday. That way, we can avoid having a random Tuesday off (I’m looking at you this year, Rosh Hashanah), which messes up my entire week. Listen, I really hope I am not being wildly insensitive to religious tradition by making this suggestion. I am banking on it being the tradition that counts, and not necessarily the specific date. I mean, Easter always falls on a Sunday, right? Couldn’t the work-restricted portions of Yom Kippur and Christmas and Ramadan and Passover and Eid all fall on a Friday or a Monday? Please? More long weekends and fewer random mid-week days off. If you are or know someone who can arrange this, I assume you will get right on it. 

Speaking of Rosh Hashanah, which I was, briefly, this Apple Honey Cake is calling my name. Alas, a person can not live by apple honey cake alone. What else can I make this week?

Dinners for the Week of September 22-29

  • Chicken Noodle Soup: I am making a big pot of this for a loved one who is having surgery. The recipe makes a TON of soup, so I am going to withhold enough for me and my husband to eat for dinner one night. I don’t really like chicken noodle soup (and somehow I always misspell “noodle” as “noddle” which is irritating), but my mom swears by its healing powers, so why not enjoy some of whatever benefits it confers?

Oh! We are having out-of-town friends visit this coming weekend! That is super exciting. No idea what I will feed them, but I choose to leave that for Future Suzanne to deal with. 

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Cupcakes Report, Dinners This Week

I’ve been seeing signs of spring for weeks now, but it seems like over the weekend everything decided simultaneously to bloom. Flowering trees everywhere! I love it.

Saturday was my Day of Cupcakes. I made two batches of cupcakes at the same time, which seemed like it was just asking for disaster – like carrots in the vanilla cupcakes or lemon in the carrot cake cupcakes. But I persevered and wound up with two batches of cupcakes: vanilla cupcakes filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon cream cheese buttercream, and carrot cake cupcakes topped with cream cheese buttercream. My family has eaten some of each, and no one made any weird faces, so I am going to call it a win.

Carla was a huge help with the cupcakes. She’s pretty hit-or-miss with wanting to help me bake, and that’s fine. But she was very interested in helping to decorate. I put her in charge of the carrot cake cupcakes, which were adorned with toasted coconut and Cadbury mini-eggs. She did a great job – they are adorable.

They may be cute, but they are FULL of golden raisins. Hork.

I made the chicks for the vanilla cupcakes; Carla provided supportive commentary and added the eyes. I think they turned out to be full of personality.

They all look either stunned or slightly alarmed to have found themselves on top of cupcakes.

Now we’re back to normal, so I need to come up with some dinners for the week ahead.

Hmm. I have been staring blankly at this document for some long minutes now and I still can’t come up with a single dinner idea.

Okay, this is the exact reason I created a “database” of reliably delicious dinners. I will just visit that post and pull out a few options, plus tacos, which just now occurred to me.

Dinners for the Week of April 21-28

  • Tacos: We haven’t had tacos in a while. Let’s do it.
  • Big Salad with Chicken: Okay this isn’t a recipe per se, it’s just a bunch of veggies and lettuce and roasted chicken topped with balsamic dressing.

Okay! That’s a decent starting off point! We also have begun The End of School Year Madness already, so there’s an evening school event one night which will necessitate some sort of grab-bag style dinner. I’ll deal with that at the time.