holiday

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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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Tuesday Randomosity: The Let’s All Pretend I Didn’t Completely Miss November Edition

December already. Another Tuesday. Grey has returned to the sky. Skiff of snow. Never-ending laundry. Blurry hold music, third phone call of the day. My wrist buzzing with notifications from a group chat I did not consent to join. I should be writing. What to make for dinner? A goat bleats in my brain. The persistent grey.

Let’s try to break through the grey and the goats with some bullets, shall we?

  • Dinner is killing me lately. I have whined continuously for the duration of this blog/my marriage about the Sisyphean tedium of trying to figure out what to make for dinner, and lately it seems to have come to one of its periodic peaks whereby I cannot envision even one dinner or its components. My list of Reliably Delicious Dinners looks like gibberish. My husband is infected, too; last night I asked him for ideas and he listed several options, all of which were side dishes made solely of potatoes. The added pressure of cooking for visitors is not helping. I did, finally, come up with something for dinner tonight: one pot salmon with peas, alongside savory garlic farro. My visitors love salmon; my child enjoys salmon; I like salmon; my husband dislikes salmon but has bravely agreed to eat it for the sake of harmony and wifely sanity. 
  • I am gearing up to cancel a service and ask for it to be refunded. I don’t actually think I will get a refund, but I am kind of gleeful at the prospect of talking to someone about why I am cancelling this completely worthless service. The only problem is that I don’t do great with confrontation, so I’m trying to prepare in advance what I’m going to say. Perhaps then I can be very methodical in my explanation also prevent myself from going all shrill when I enter into confrontation without warning. I don’t want to yell or be mean to whoever I talk to; it isn’t her fault that her company sucks. But I do want to be very clear about why her company sucks and that I Am Done. It would also be nice if they listen instead of writing me off as a Karen or a crank.
  • Speaking of companies that suck.  I got a letter recently from a financial service that there is an error with how my name is spelled in their system, and that it does not match how the IRS spells the name, which of course is going to result in, I don’t know, my imminent execution or something. Fine, whatever, I can fill out a form with the correct spelling. But guess what the misspelling they have on file is? My correctly spelled first name, my correctly spelled last name, and an ampersand. Like… couldn’t the people at the financial services company just… remove the ampersand? Is it not obviously a typo? 
  • The above reminds me of an issue we had years ago with our health insurance. The health insurance company was rejecting a fully covered claim because the name that the hospital billed under was not exactly identical to what the insurance company called the hospital in their own system. I can’t remember the exact ridiculousness, but it was something like, the insurance company covered Polkadot Rainbows Hospital and the hospital sent bills to the insurance company under the name Unicorn College – Polkadot Rainbows Hospital. And then I was stuck calling both the hospital and the insurance company and trying to get them to understand this stupid, stupid discrepancy that should not affect the coverage of my claim in any way. I am still salty about it, nearly two decades later. 
  • Perhaps could I come up with a bullet that isn’t quite so grumpy? Hmm. Hmmmmm.
  • Carla is in the most delightful holiday mood.  I woke up on December first and thought, my goodness, it’s December, and I have done NOTHING to prepare for Christmas/Hanukkah, and was about to slide down a long dark hole of holiday despair… but then Carla came skipping into my bedroom wearing a Santa hat AND reindeer antlers with jingle bells on them and announced that she’d already started decorating. Then she played “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on repeat for the rest of the day. THAT is the kind of Christmas energy I want to slather on myself like body butter. 
  • Should we do a cookie swap? One thing I have been eagerly thinking about as December sneaked up behind me and shoved me headlong into the holiday season is what cookies am I going to make???? Since I love talking about cookies as much as I love baking and eating them, I wonder if anyone would be interested in doing a bloggy cookie swap? Like, we all make cookies and document the process and then blog about it? Is that dumb? Does that require more organization and planning that I can handle? Alongside some of my old standbys and Nicole’s gingersnaps, I think I am going to try making these cranberry lemon bars. 
  • Where are you in the Christmas prep process? So far I have: 1.) finally ordered holiday cards, which I kind of threw together at the last minute on Sunday, but that’s okay because they are ORDERED, 2.) purchased a few presents for Carla and for my husband but zero presents for the other eight family members for whom I usually buy presents, 3.) bought a last-minute Advent calendar for Carla only yesterday, 4.) grabbed a little bag of gelt for Hanukkah from Trader Joe’s, and 5.) thought extensively about cookies. Oh, and I also sent my friend a Christmas goat. In terms of decor, the decorating process stalled shortly after Carla came into our bedroom and announced that she was decorating, so we have stocking holders up on the mantel, two reindeer kissing on the sideboard, the Christmas countdown figurine sitting on the kitchen table and a bin of other decorations sitting on the floor of the living room. All the other bins of decorations AND the Christmas tree are still on shelves in the basement. December is only three days old and already I feel very behind. 

That’s all I’ve got for today, Internet. I hope you are well. I miss you and I’m sorry for being such a crap blog friend lately.