So This Was Christmas

That was the Oyster Evangelist holiday table. This was the first Christmas dinner I ever put on, and I was pretty nervous about my lack of appropriate serving platters and stemware. Yup, we drank our water and wine out of Ikea tumblers and jelly jars. Not too Martha, but I don’t think anyone minded.  (Food photos follow) 

I didn’t take notes as I cooked, so I don’t have any recipes for you (except for homemade crackers, which I will post as soon as I have some time). Of the six people present, there were a multitude of food hangups/dietary restrictions ranging from vegetarianism to eats-no-mammals (?) to just garden variety obstinate pickyiness.

For these reasons I went with stuffed mushrooms plus cheese and crackers for appetizers (described as “scary appetizers” by one guest), followed by a first course of butternut squash soup, followed by homemade spaghetti and turkey-ricotta meatballs with roasted vegetables, followed by cookies and homemade ice cream. (This is our house ice cream recipe.)

I wasn’t totally consistent with taking photos either, but I snapped a few. Here are the uncooked meatballs:

I made them by mixing about a pound of ground turkey with about 1/2 cup of ricotta, 1 egg, Romano cheese, red pepper flakes, salt, fresh breadcrumbs, and a flurry of minced parsley.

Here’s the spaghetti, just cranked out and waiting to dunked in the boiling water:

Here’s one pan of vegetables prepped for roasting:

I made two half-sheet pans, assuming there would leftovers, but every last broccoli floret was devoured. I broke the broccoli heads into florets and trimmed and peeled the stems, and sliced the red pepper. Then I tossed the vegetables with olive oil, salt, red pepper flakes, and a fine coating of microplaned Romano cheese.

Here’s the cookie tray:

Yes, I know I still owe you the shortbread recipe. You will find the chocolate cookie recipe here. We discovered that crumbling a chocolate cookie up into the ice cream resulted in the best dish of cookies-and-cream we had ever had.

After dinner, the parents left, and my sister, her husband, Dan and I settled in for another bottle of wine and a few intense rounds of Bomber Man on Dan’s ancient Sega Dream Cast. We took turns snuggling with Charlie, everybody’s favorite dinner guest:

That’s a pretty cute puppy-niece I have there, huh?