Christmas Eve

In my family, we've always had the big meal and the opening of family presents (as opposed to Santa presents) on Christmas Eve. (I eventually found out that this is yet another way that German culture has kept its tenacious hold on us, even more than 150 years after my German and Swiss forebears emigrated to America.) So I spent all day cooking, and it made me very happy. Big ol' turkey. Macadamia stuffing, in quantities excessive enough to make even me wonder how we're going to eat it all (the answer to that is usually "A-duh, like, so, Laura's going to have stuffing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all week, how did you think?"). Steamed green beans. Candied sweet potatoes (with cardamom, mm, mm!). Cranberry sauce. Ricotta-and-roast-garlic mashed potatoes (details on request). And the last of my carefully hoarded cans of American pumpkin — heartfelt thanks, Kelly and Tim — made into a dee-licious pie (pity about the crust this time, though). Nom nom nom!

Note to the frugal: if your pie-filling recipe ends up making too much filling for the size of pie crust you have, sift together some flour and baking powder (about 1 tsp per two cups of flour seemed to work for me), mix it into the leftover filling, and bake it as a sort of pumpkin bread/pumpkin pudding (in the English/Australian sense of pudding). Both the pie and the pudding taste FABULOUS with some nice, fresh whipped cream (although I'm hardly one to frown on spray-cream either).

In between cooking this feast, I've been in email-and-blog-storm mode with the other Gauntleteers, who are finished or nearly finished, and who are generously offering crits of my Gauntlet stories.

Loving God, thank you that we have full stomachs and gifts to share and friends to email and a sparkly Christmas tree to stare at. Help us use 2008 to make things better for someone, or many someones.