it's not Christmas any more

Or so says Fiona, who has been looking at my blog, and commented that I have not posted in over a week.

Merry New Year!

We had a turkey supper at home tonight, just the four of us. We kept the fixings simple: Brussels sprouts (which are correctly spelled with an upper case B and a lower case s, or s-es if you are being particular and specific. I mean, you wouldn't want to spell is BruSSels SproutS, now would you?) We also had all dressed sweet potatoes that Andy found in the newspaper. Well, more specifically, he found the recipe in the newspaper. I bought the sweet potatoes at the produce store. If you had sweet potatoes hiding in your newspaper they might roll out and knock over you coffee while you were reading the paper. The potatoes were called "all-dressed" because they were roasted, scooped and mashed with a lot of roasted garlic (I mean a lot) and a moderate amount of butter and cheese. On second thought I guess we should call them dessert. We had mashed potatoes too, because otherwise what would you do with the gravy? And gravy. Andy is the King of mashed potatoes and gravy. I always get him to make those two parts of the meal. This is partly because he is so good at it, and partly because I do not like mashed potatoes or gravy, so I'm not a good person to judge if they are yummy or yukky because I just don't like them. Dessert will be "Naked Apple Pie," a recipe that Fiona found. It's called naked because you don't make a crust. It's the baked, spiced apples without the pastry. This sounds very yummy, especially because we do have vanilla ice cream to go with it. We are waiting for the pie to get out of the shower - oh, I mean the oven. Then we will eat it and watch Singing in the Rain because it is raining. We will gaze at the movie and avert our eyes from the pie so it doesn't think we are staring just because it is naked.

Turkey is a very easy supper to prepare, and now we have made up for the fact that Fiona didn't get a Thanksgiving turkey dinner this year. Andy and I visited her for American Thanksgiving, and we ate at a restaurant that offered a turkey dinner, but Fiona chose a spinach salad instead. I'm glad we had the turkey here, with Alex and Fiona sitting at the table with Andy and me. That's a special treat. Fiona will be home for another dozen days, but Alex works a lot of evenings, and I'm going back to work Monday, so we won't get a lot of whole family together time after this weekend. Tomorrow we will walk around downtown Vancouver together, in the rain, most likely. Alex hasn't had a Japadog yet, Fiona is going to go to a dance class in the city then meet up with us, and we all want to sit at a pub and look at the water. I want to walk around the edge of the water or perhaps up Denman Street and along Davie Street before we all gather at the pub beside the water.

In other news, we kept the Christmas tree up until January 2. I thought it would be sad to take the tree down after New Year, but it was okay. Fiona wanted the tree up for a bit longer, because she got here on the 22nd. She was out the night we took it down, so it wasn't too sad for her, and Andy helped me take it down, so it went quickly and easily. All of the boxes went straight into the crawl space, and now Christmas has disappeared, except for a cup full of candy canes, a silver bowl full of Christmas cards, and the outdoor lights on the house and their boxes on the landing. Andy will get to the lights in a few days. For now they are very pretty when it gets dark so early.

The pie just came out of the oven, so I will cease blogging for now. Christmas was lovely and low key and now it's over. We still have some warm all-together family time for the first days of the New Year.

Merry 2013, happy sweet potatoes, and look out for Brussels sprouts with uppity s-es, and pies going starkers.

question: what are the bright spots in your baby new year?

mompoet - gobble gobble