This is my favorite time of the year. The mad Christmas rush is over; Christmas dinner has been cooked, eaten, enjoyed, and packaged up for leftovers; I can choose to head out and spend money from my various gift cards (rather than having to rush out and gifts for those people I forgot); I'm wearing nice new jeans and a nice new sweater. Through all of this, I'm still on flex time at work, which means I need to take care of urgent business, but shouldn't worry about doing anything more. (I hope I'm not, like, divulging company secrets.) So I'm sitting here drinking coffee, listening to music, and playing with my blog.
Christmas lunch went very well. I made a pork center-cut loin roast for the main course (seasoned with hairy-back spice, rosemary, pepper, and chunks of garlic cloves in the pan), twice-baked potatoes, fresh-snapped green beans, and a garden salad. Dessert was Nase's pumpkin roll and my pine-nut-and-honey tart, a new (and expensive!) experiment. To drink, we had a 2001 Fetzer Gewurtztraminer and a 1999 Parducci Petit Syrah to start, and a 1999 Buena Vista Chardonnay and 1999 Berringer Founder's Estate Merlot for lunch. All in all, one of the best Christmas meals I've been a part of. :-)
More pictures of the house are up. We took the kids and a couple of their friends up to BVS to look at the house and play in the snow. It was fun, albeit quite muddy. Still no firm move-in date yet, but we seem to be on schedule. YAY!
Posted by pcg at December 26, 2002 10:40 AMWhat-the-fruitcake is "hairy-back spice"? The longer I contemplate, the more grossed out I become.
Posted by: alan on December 26, 2002 3:17 PMHairy Back starts off with my wife carefully scraping hair off my back....
No, no, it's my own kind of Cajun spice. Carefully blended in small batches to add just the right amount of flavor and punch to anything. Of course, I almost always add more punch, it's more of a base seasoning.
If you like Cajun food, I'd be happy to get you a sample....
Posted by: Bruce on January 3, 2003 9:36 AM