A Texas Christmas

I'm not gonna lie...with the weather in the 70's and no family around, this Christmas didn't feel much like Christmas. Matt and I tried to make the best of it, and did a pretty good job, I think. I've come to realize more and more the truthfulness of the old saying, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach". This was most apparent this Christmas. I discovered that I am most nostalgic for the people, activities and cold weather that have always surrounded the Christmas season. Not that Matt isn't nostalgic for his family, but I think he is most nostalgic for the food associated with the season. This year, we baked his family's traditional holiday cookie, "Berliner Kranser" a.k.a. The Norwegian Butter Knot Cookie. Very yummy, but very time consuming. We also made his mom's peanut brittle and toffee. We did manage to squeeze in one of my family's ginger snap recipes.

Matt really wanted to have a quiet Christmas Eve with just the two of us. That sounded ultra depressing to me, but I gave in. I have a hard time cooking all day for just the two of us. I am MUCH more motivated when we have guests to share it with and someone else to appreciate the hard work besides ourselves. Anyway, we started cooking our 5 course meal at 1 pm or so, and didn't sit down to eat until about 8 pm. After 10 minutes of conversation-less eating, we were done. As we chomped on our last bite, Matt agreed that next time we need to invite others over. 7 hours of work for 10 minutes of glory= not worth it.

Matt's family always has lobster tail and filet mignon for Christmas Eve dinner. Having never cooked or eaten either, Matt took the lead on these dishes and did a fabulous job. I was his trusty assistant. Someone had to fan the smoke alarm while the meat was searing, right? I also did have a hand in making the sauce for the filet mignon. We found the recipe on the internet and it is a slice of divinity! Here it is: http://www.stephencooks.com/2007/07/pan-seared-file.html. We added a slice of bacon around the the outside of the steaks and substituted chicken stock for the wine in the sauce. The picture on the website turned out much better than ours and is probably a more acurate representation of what we ate:

One of Matt's all time favorite holiday treats is his mom's orange jello salad. Recognize this, Laila?

We ate well, to say the least. We had lots of leftovers to bring to our friend's "Leftover Party" on the 26th (what a fabulous idea BTW).