I was preparing all last week for the upcoming celebration feasts I had planned. Here's what our menu turned out to be:Christmas Eve: French Onion Soup, Pear & Avocado Salad, and for dessert, Croquembouche.
Christmas Morning: Homemade Cinnamon rolls, fruit, and breakfast casserole
Christmas Dinner: Prime Rib, Au Jus, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, pumpkin fritters and a hypothetical almond cake which I never made.
It all turned out great....except for the Croquembouche. After all my hard work, one batch of my little cream puffs didn't exactly "puff". In all actuality, they were as flat as pancakes. See, they should have been on the cover of Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat.
But I made some more, still not quite like they should be, but it worked. I made the cream custard, filled them, made the caramel "glue" and put it all together. The end result looked great and tasted even better.
Here's the prime rib. Ummm...why have I not made this before?!! It was sooooo easy and soooo good! BEFORE:
AFTER:
Our Christmas dinner:
Now, onto more important things....PEOPLE. We were lucky enough to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas day with Cameron's good friend, Beau Suder. We were so glad that he could be a part of our family (which he already is) for this special occasion.
This is Beau enjoying his Christmas presents from us.
After dinner, we read the story of Jesus' birth and then opened our stockings. Apparently, Santa comes early to our house.
Christmas morning of course was a bit earlier than it used to be. But exciting nonetheless. We handed out our gifts and took turns opening them one by one. Malone didn't quite understand this situation and just wanted to open all of them at once. We all were so blessed by all the gifts we received. My personal favorite was some pretty little earrings from Cameron.
I gave Cameron some new wine glasses and a decanter.
My favorite gift to give was definitely Malone's box! Christmas eve, after she was in a deep slumber, we had to put it together. With lots of help from Cameron and Beau, we finally finished it. It was awesome!! It has a door, windows, curtains and even a roof. Granted, it does look a little ghetto with it only being partly painted...spray painted, that is...apparently there's not as much paint in a can of spray paint as you'd think. But still, its AWESOME!
After gifts, we had breakfast, relaxed all day and I finished cooking dinner. Here's Cameron and I about to eat breakfast....still in our pjs.
Once we were sufficiently stuffed from dinner, we headed over to our friends, the Scheuermans', where we solved world hunger problems, wars, government and then played Settlers of Catan until the wee hours.It was a perfect ending!
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