Christmas Dinner, Brownies, and a Distinct Lack of Beer

Our traditional Christmas is filled with lots of travel and this year was no different. Unlike last year we did not need to zip home to try to outrun a blizzard so it was slightly more relaxing than our Cannonball Run-esque journey home last year.



Tonight we had a fairly standard Christmas/Boxing Day meal with baked beans and mustard pickles. Sadly these were the only baked beans I could find and they were vegetarian. I'm a firm believer that baked beans should have a big wad of cooked pork fat floating around in them. Unfortunately we had dinner just a few hours after returning home and my lack of foresight did not allow us the time needed to prepare baked beans from scratch.



This year we had a bit of breach in standard procedure: I made the torciere. This has never happened before. I made the filling on Christmas Eve and I even made the pie dough today, something I generally refuse to do as I am not a baking guy.

That being said it came out pretty good using Jen's mom's pie dough recipe.





Jen made some delicious scalloped potatoes and we served it all up, me with my traditional Woonsocket-style ketchup and black pepper. Jen is extremely tolerant of my style of eating this with ketchup despite the fact that I think most people shudder in horror at the thought.



For beer tonight I had . . . nothing.

I have a few more delicious Christmas beers in the fridge. I really wanted to enjoy the St. Bernardus Christmas Ale tonight but my stomach has just been plain wonky lately. I'm thinking that even with this fairly heavy meal (though in small portions) I would be best served to

Given that Christmas beers are among some of my favorites of the season this is not my favorite yuletide outcome but if that's the worst thing that happens to me this Christmas I'd still count myself as one of the luckier humans on planet Earth.



For dessert I smuggled home some of my Aunt Debbie's brownies from yesterday's Christmas dinner. You see, my Aunt Debbie makes the best brownies (blondies, actually) in the entire world. She's been bringing them to Christmas every year since I can remember. That is except for one year when she tried something new and people were pissed. I was probably at the front of the angry mob wielding a torch and pitchfork and calling for her to sent out to us to face swift justice.

We've calmed down since then in large part because she started making them again. I've also asked her for the recipe about twelve times over the years. I just searched my email and couldn't find it which means she probably sent it to me back in the days when people used email clients instead of webmail. It might be in one of my old backup files.

Does anyone have a copy of Eudora 3.0.5 they could send me?