Marlene

oops. I forgot this one. Anne Willan, A Cook's book of Quick Fixes.

I have several to add to this list: The Cooks book The Silver Spoon Molto Italiano Better homes and gardens slow cooker recipes 3 pack from WS - New York, San Francisco and New Orleans The Ultimate Rice cooker cookbook The Food Lovers companion (ok, maybe not a cookbook by defination) Tomorrow, my copy of Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook should arrive.

I was informed tonight that our upright freezer shelves are bowing under the weight of a variety of items. Opps. Time to do a whole bunch of cooking I think, which means having a lot of people over, since the roasts in my freezer would feed most of my neighbourhood.

Most of my All Clad is stainless steel and is from at least two years ago, with the exception of the two new saute pans I received from Christmas. I particularly like my roasting pans, although I understand they aren't making them the same way anymore. So far, I've only used both saute pans for deep frying and they performed just fine. I don't however to a lot of heavy duty professional cooking so perhaps I wouldn't notice! I like my SS All Clad.

Clearly, I have a lot to learn about rice. So what then are the measurements for regular long grain rice? Remember, the only rice I've ever cooked in my entire life is minute rice.

I'll go pull out a package of short ribs, since I'll be making these for dinner tomorrow, but I haven't really gone by pounds. I tend to use 7-9 short ribs in this recipe, english style, not flanken style. Edited to add: I just pulled a pack. Since there are only two of us for dinner, the pack I pulled out has 6 short ribs in it, weighing 3 and 3/4 pds. My normal pack has 9 ribs in it weighing approx 6 pds.

My absolute favourite way to do short ribs: Short ribs with Port and Honey

Brie fritters, made from the recipe Anna found, above.

Ok, I must be doing something totally wrong. Tonight was regular long grain rice in the rice cooker. 2 cups of rice which I rinsed and strained. Added rice to cooker and water to the two cup mark. I still got sticky rice, not lovely fluffy rice. How do you work these things anyway?

And my entertaining season winds to a close. Whew. Christmas Day was just the two of us so we had a simple beef fondue and some Cristal champagne. No good pictures. Well except for the Champagne bottle. Boxing Day was my big family dinner. Dinner for 8. We started with a few nibbles: Brie Fritters with a raspberry dipping sauce. These were simply awesome. Prepare the brie ahead of time and then it takes seconds to deep fry them when guests arrive: Beef Tenderloin Canapes with Cream Cheese Horseradish Spread: And the biggest shrimp I've ever seen in my life: The main event was Prime Rib. I think this is the best Prime Rib I've ever bought. I had an interesting conversation with the "butcher". I got the roast from Whole Foods. My normal butcher biker guy was busy so I got this young kid. He cut a beautiful roast for me and showed it to me. "Perfect" said I. "I'll just go cut the fat cap off" said he. "Well, you could", said I. "except, if you do, I'll have to kill you and since it's Christmas and all, perhaps you should just leave it on. Better for everyone's health that way". In the meantime, my butcher biker guy wandered over and recognized me. "No problems' Mrs. Newell?" "Oh no" I replied. "We were just having a friendly conversation about the fat cap". Mr Butcher Biker guy turned to the kid and said, "do exactly what she wants. This lady knows her meat and knows what she likes". What a guy. The Christmas table: The beef: Hard to tell from this, but it was delightfully med rare to rare in the middle: Roasted potatoes: Yorkshire Puddings: and a Tomato Onion Salad. I made a bleu cheese dressing to go with this, but no picture, alas. Dessert was a chocolate mousse cake and special coffee for which I also have no pictures. Not too bad for a woman juggling a sick child, dinner for 8, and and elderly mother. This pretty much concludes my entertaining for 2005. Normally, we have a New Year's Eve bash here, but this year we are spending two nights in Niagara Falls with my brother and his fiance celebrating his life and the wonders of the past year and the hopes for the coming year.

I can actually now make a reasonably decent pie crust using my KA. Cakes, cookies, frostings are all much easier

I took mine off. For the sticky part that didn't come off, we used a product called Goo Gone and it's perfect. It's great for getting those stupid bar code labels off too that never come off glasses and such properly.

4 qt and 6 quart All Clad saute pans. The 4 qt comes with a splatter screen and tongs Chef's choice 120 professional knife sharpener Several cookbooks including the Silver Spoon, The Cook's Book, Molto Italiano and a neat book by Anne Willan, A Cook's book of Quick Fixes. (for when I make those really dumb cooking mistakes.) Oh and a rather large cheque from my mother, with which I'm going to purchase a Le Cruset cast iron pot stand and a flip waffler.

I have two full size fridges plus two bar fridges that can be emptied to make room if necessary! Mostly, I try to send stuff home with people. After cooking for two days straight, the last thing I really want to do is eat the same food again. Not to mention the fact that most people in my house don't eat leftovers.

So I have one of my usual stupid questions. Is basmati rice considered to be sweet rice? We did this rice in the rice cooker tonight using the regular rice setting. Although it was good, I wouldn't have considered it fluffy by any stretch of the imagination. It was sort of sticky. I'm wondering if we used the wrong setting.

I like to have some cubes of reduced stock as they really finish off a sauce or a gravy nicely. However, I think my nex batch will try the i cup in a ziplock bag method. Now for my next stupid stock question. I had turkey stock on the stove last night that I was starting to reduce. I had to turn it off as we needed to out. I woke up this morning and realized that I forgot to put it back in the fridge. So is this stock contaminated now? Should I throw it out, or, if I start boiling it again will all potential bacteria die?

My new rice cooker arrived today. I now have the Z fuzzy logic 5 cup rice cooker. I have no clue how to use this of course. It has a quick cooking rice feature. What exactly does this mean? You cook minute rice in the rice cooker? The directions that came with this thing are a little unclear. What types of rice are best for this thing anyway?

For 2 Christmas Day nibbles cranberry and brie mini muffins welsh rarebit bread boxes Cristal to drink Main Beef Fondue twice baked or oven roasted potatoes roasted asparagus 1998 Amarone Dessert Brie with chili honey baked apple tartlets 1999 LBV Crofts Port Boxing Day for 10 Nibbles mini potato pancakes with apple onion confit Brie Fritters with raspberry compote Main Prime Rib Roasted Potatoes Gravy Yorkshire Pudding salad or veg, haven't decided Desserts I have no clue. My brother insisted on bringing it.

Last night of cooking for company before I get to start gearing up for Christmas and Boxing dinner extravaganzas. Kept it more or less simple tonight. Pot roast (it's almost impossible to make pot roast look good in a picture, but I swear this was fork tender) Look, a green vegetable. Broccoli: Cheese sauce and mashed potatoes: And creme brulee:

We have a Miele. While it is great for washing dishes, a number of things suck about it. None of my sheet racks or my big stock pot fit in it. I'm washing more things by hand these days which I loathe. It's small, so I seem to be running more loads every day than I did before. And you have to feed it salt. Don't ask me why, but you do. This thing sucks up more salt than Canadian roads during winter. I quietly pray for this to break down every day so I can get a new one. We had a Frigidaire Gallery in the old house. It wasn't as quiet as I would have liked but it handled all the things above and more.

At our wedding, we served a french Onion soup with a puff pastry lid. It was divine!

I rather like your photography skills! Your "baked brie with roasted garlic" just became my new wallpaper on the office computer and my boss is drooling... ← lol. You know, I got the idea from Whole Foods. They sell them like that in their cheese section. I almost bought one and then said, hey wait, I can do that myself.

Which potatoes? The piped ones? I found them very easy and loved being able to make them ahead. I'd definately make them again. We are off to the Omega tonight, a local steakhouse here in Oakville that I've written about before. And I've made the pot roast for tomorrow night's dinner!

I'm in non stop cook mode with my in laws here. Tonight's dinner was very simple, ham, basted with bourbon mustard sauce, gratin of potato and salad. Well we got pictures of the ham and potatoes but nothing else. Ham: Potatoes: I really need to get back in charge of picture taking. My picture taking skills may suck, but at least I get the shots I want. Tomorrow night we are taking them out for dinner, whew.

Whew. Ok, dinner was a little late. My timing was way off on the turkey for some reason. I think it might have still been frozen inside. I did not take most of the pics tonight so there are some missing that I would have taken. However, here we go with Christmas dinner #1. First I had to make a mustard paste for the turkey to leave it soak overnight: Then I made the cranberry sauce: And that's where picture taking fell down. I have neither a picture of the finished turkey nor of the cranberry sauce. Anway, we started with baked brie topped with roasted garlic: I had made the potatoes earlier and piped them: Set the table (interestingly the first thing my son said when he came in today was "what's wrong with our dining room chairs?". He'd never seen the chair covers before. Unfortunately I didn't have time to do anything about getting the covers custom retrofitted for the arm chairs so they remain coverless. Stuck the carrots in the slow cooker: The finished turkey, carved the gravy Finished potatoes: And the carmelized apples in the phyllo shells with some whipped cream. Again, since I didn't take the pictures (not that my picture taking is stellar by any means), there were some shots I didn't get and some that I would have liked to have close ups of. But you get the general idea. I loved the apples in the shells and it was a perfect ending. Tomorrow's dinner will be baked ham, potatoes au gratin, some sort of veg, probably asparagus and if anyone really wants dessert, I have some left over apples and shells.