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Hello! Happy Friday! The first day that I have been very certain what day it is, in a long time. 

I hope you had a lovely Christmas day and that you are having a happy new year so far. I have continued to roll with the “I’m RECOVERING, and it’s very important for me to REST” thing, plus with lots and lots of food. I always feel a little bad that we don’t do St. Nicholas Day or OLG day or St. Lucy’s day festivities like all my Catholic friends on social media, but then I remember we have two birthdays in December, plus we celebrate Hanukkah, and then of course Christmas, and then of course New Year’s even/day, and then we have two birthdays in early January. What this boils down to is, if we went through any more butter or sugar or fancy cheese, it would trigger some kind of federal investigation.

Every last person in the house besides me got pretty to very sick, and they’re all still recovering, so we didn’t do any day trips or sledding or anything. We just ate a lot of food. (I attribute my apparent immunity to the vitamin D3 gummies I have been taking all year, but who knows.) 

The precise timeline of what I cooked this past week is pretty fuzzy, so I’ll just do a photo dump in more or less chronological order.

Before Christmas, we made buckeyes and Sophia made fudge. Not sure what her recipe was, but when I make it, this is the one I follow, which does not require a candy thermometer. I also made a huge amount of sugar cookie dough,

and told the kids they could do whatever they wanted with it. I was planning to make gochujang caramel cookies, but couldn’t find the gochujang; so I made these cranberry orange cookies from King Arthur Flour.  They turned out great. 

Not thrilling to look upon (although it does get you to roll the dough in coarse sugar before you bake them, and I ended up using several colors of sugar, which gave some of them some weird colors!), but they were so cheery and cozy. They were both tender and chewy, and the orange flavor came through really well. I think I was the only one who really loved them, but I ate them steadily for two weeks, or however long it’s been. When they got a little stale, I put them in a ziplock bag with a piece of bread, and they softened right up again. 

Then it was Christmas eve, time to make cinnamon rolls! I used the Alton Brown overnight recipe which is easy and reliable. I made the dough and let it rise for three hours, and then Benny and Corrie did the actual rolling and forming.

The formed rolls go in the fridge overnight, and then you let them rise again in the morning for half an hour, and then bake them. I only made a double recipe, because cinnamon rolls get stale really fast, and it’s just sad.

We decorate the tree on Christmas eve, and then go to midnight Mass. Some of the kids were too sick to go, and those of us who went were pretty exhausted, so I didn’t get any pictures! But the sermon was very affecting and I cried my stupid head off. Then we got home and set up all the presents and stockings and fell into bed around 2:30 a.m. 

Christmas morning was wonderful. Two of the adult kids came to Mass with us and spent the night, and one more came in the morning, and we just had a happy morning. A few pics here:

Damien fried up an outlandish amount of bacon, and we had that with the cinnamon buns and orange juice and some fresh fruit, plus various delicacies that Clara brought from the bakery where she works

Then that night we ordered enough Chinese food to feed our family for generations to come

and THEN it was the first night of Hanukkah, so we lighted EVEN MORE CANDLES,

and then I imagine we all went to bed, although it’s a bit of a blur. At some point during the week, I did find the baby, and added it to the nativity scene. 

I think we had leftovers the day after Christmas, and then the next day, we had deli sandwiches, and then Vermonter sandwiches (roast chicken breast, bacon, cheddar cheese, green apple slices, and honey mustard on sourdough bread), and then I remember the kids being delighted that I was serving yet a third kind of sandwich, but I forget what it was. 

Then I decided that whatever day it was was the day for the big semi-boneless leg of lamb I had bought on sale several weeks ago. I have tried many recipes for leg of lamb, and the best one is also by far the easiest. 

Comes out so delicious every time. 

Because it was halfway through Hanukkah, I also made potato latkes. These turned out a little bit disappointing. They were just kind of dense and dark.

Next time, I will grate the potatoes by hand, rather than putting them through the food processor. (I won’t share my recipe, since it wasn’t that great! I just do potato, egg, salt and pepper, and flour, and there are a million recipes online)

I did have the bright idea to dig out a jar of tamarind chutney

and I had my latkes with chutney, which is wonderful. And then also I had some others with sour cream and a little salmon roe. And then some others with applesauce. Maybe they were pretty good latkes after all.

So yeah, it was a pretty swanky meal, and generated a lot of interest from other parties

who are currently, tragically on a dry food-only diet due to an unfortunate habit of yakking up everything else he eats. 

The next day I was planning to serve buffalo chicken salad (greens, frozen buffalo chicken, crumbled blue cheese, crunchy fried onions from a can, cherry tomatoes, shredded pepper jack cheese, and ranch dressing), but I forgot to buy salad. So we had what we had, and I sweetened the deal by making baby sufganiyot (jelly donuts). 

They were actually donut holes made with a choux pastry from the King Arthur recipe, so you don’t have to mess around with yeast or rising times. Best eaten right away, but they’re quite easy to make, and fun. I fried about eight at a time in a pot of hot oil, and they bob around and flip over on their own, which is very cute.

My dough was a little sticky, so they ended up in sort of spiky tardigrade shapes

and then you let them drain on paper towel for a bit, and then you pipe jelly into them 

and then gently roll them in sugar. 

Lavish and delicious. I like the small size, because they’re so sweet and rich, so you don’t get overwhelmed because it’s just two bites.

This brings us up to Dec. 30, if anyone’s keeping track, and the next day was New Year’s Eve. I found a last little bit of cookie dough in the fridge, and made three very specific shapes:

Then the next day was New Year’s Eve, and our tradition is sushi and dumplings. Not gonna lie, I may have overextended myself a bit by this point, and I was a little bit punchy and weepy. I made a cake for the next day, and then I made the dumplings more or less using this recipe and made a pot of good short-grain rice, and made some sauce to make sushi rice

with Corrie to fan it while I gently sliced the sauce into the rice just like on Cooking Mama. Then we went to the vigil Mass for Mary, the Mother of God feast day, and I was fairly cranky when we got back, and maybe accidentally set the steamer baskets on fire by mistake, who can say. 

But we did have dumplings!

And we did have some raggy ass sushi! 

and then we decided nobody was really up for our traditional Marx Brothers movie, so we watched Raising Arizona instead, accompanied by ice cream sodas. This didn’t quite bring us up to midnight, so we limped up to 12:00 with the Frasier RDWRER episode where they get in touch with America

and find it beautiful, flawed, complicated, and unpleasant.

And then we went to bed! And then the next day was Sophia’s birthday! The big kids went to see Nosfertatu and I decorated Sophia’s cake, and then took the little girls to see Moana 2. Which was a perfectly pleasant and pretty movie that I forgot as soon as the credits rolled. 

Sophia’s cake turned out pretty good, though. She requested a strawberry cake with lemon cream cheese frosting, with Moomin, Hello Kitty, and Snoopy holding hands and being friends in a meadow, and this is how that turned out:

Snoopy has clearly been snacking heavily these past few weeks, and the Moomin does not look completely trustworthy to me, but dammit, I thought it was a good cake. 

I watched a few videos on how to make roses out of strawberries, and I can’t say I mastered it, but they turned out decent

Sophia requested calzones for dinner, which is easy enough

and I actually only had half the amount of ricotta cheese the recipe called for, and they turned out great.

May do it that way on purpose from now on. She liked her cake and her presents, yay! Then when the younger kids went to bed, I made up the requested fancy snack platter

Thank you, Aldi.

Damien and I went to bed while the rest of them did I don’t know what. If you look closely, you can see that I had plenty of leftover edible metallic foil (purchased at Walmart) from the cake, and was not afraid to use it. 

I also had something from Aldi that is new to me: tête de moine cheese rosettes.

and since the theme of the last few weeks was Cheese Without Frontiers, I bought a pack. They look like this:

and for the life of me, I can’t remember what they taste like. Kind of like parmesan, I think. 

Then the next day, I cleared the table for the first time in two weeks. I’m really good at just leaning into the joyful mess and the happy chaos around birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah/New Year, but then in early January, I hit a wall and just start throwing shit away, and it feels AMAZING.

Still sticky, but we’re getting there. We’ll be human again, you’ll see. 

So, Jan. 2 was supposed to be the first day back at school for some of the kids, which is ridiculous. Still, I figured time to go is time to go. I had set the alarm for 6:40 and resigned myself to my fate.

At 8 a.m. Damien nudged me awake and I sprung into action. Realized I had set the alarm for p.m., not a.m. No matter! Late is better than never. So I woke up Irene, Benny, and Corrie, and they all sadly got up, but Irene was practically delirious with exhaustion, so I sent her back to bed. Then I let the dog out and fed the ducks and turned on the turtle lights and sat down with my coffee, and double checked the school website. Which . . . was kind of ambiguous. 

That’s ambiguous, right? So I was like, screw this, we’re already an hour and a half late and there may not even BE school. You kids go back to bed. So then I went back to bed myself, and then later while I was doing some gentle yoga, the school emailed me to ask if the kids were sick, which, sure. Yes.

And then I discovered that Irene (who goes to a different school, and whom I had woken up and then sent back to bed) definitely didn’t have school anyway. So I took Corrie out for a haircut and nobody had any regrets, as far as I know. 

For supper, I found a hunk of roast beef that I didn’t even remember buying, so I roasted that for supper. I sprinkled it heavily with garlic salt and pepper and seared it on all sides in very hot olive oil, and then I just chunked it uncovered in a 350 oven for about an hour, checked to make sure it was done, let it rest a little, and sliced it up. 

I served it with basically everything else I could find

which turned out to be pomegranate, leftover lamb, leftover shrimp, and miscellaneous crackers and cheese, including a round of cheap brie which I heated up in the microwave like an absolute criminal. We also had lots of baguettes lurking about getting stale, so I sliced them up and toasted them in the oven with olive oil and garlic salt. 

I think this was the best meal I’ve had all year.

And then this morning it was Damien’s turn to bring the kids to school, which he actually DID, the big show-off. 

Tonight we are having quesadillas.

And that’s my story! Thanks for joining me through what, in retrospect, was mainly a Journey Through Cheese No regrets! No regrets! And happy new year to you, every one. 

5 from 1 vote

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No-fail no-chill sugar cookies

Basic "blank canvas"sugar cookies that hold their shape for cutting and decorating. No refrigeration necessary. They don't puff up when you bake them, and they stay soft under the icing. You can ice them with a very basic icing of confectioner's sugar and milk. Let decorated cookies dry for several hours, and they will be firm enough to stack.

Servings 24 large cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1-2 tsp vanilla and/or almond extract. (You could also make these into lemon cookies)
• 1 egg
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 cups flour

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350.

2. Cream together butter and sugar in mixer until smooth.

3. Add egg and extracts.

4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt, and baking powder.

5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar and mix until smooth.

6. Roll the dough out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch. Cut cookies.

7. Bake on ungreased baking sheets for 6-8 minutes. Don't let them brown. They may look slightly underbaked, but they firm up after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit in the pan for a bit before transferring to a cooling rack.

8. Let them cool completely before decorating!

5 from 1 vote

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Calzones

This is the basic recipe for cheese calzones. You can add whatever you'd like, just like with pizza. Warm up some marinara sauce and serve it on the side for dipping. 

Servings 12 calzones

Ingredients

• 3 balls pizza dough
• 32 oz ricotta
• 3-4 cups shredded mozzarella
• 1 cup parmesan
• 1 Tbsp garlic powder
• 2 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp salt
• 1-2 egg yolks for brushing on top
• any extra fillings you like: pepperoni, olives, sausage, basil, etc.

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400. 

2. Mix together filling ingredients. 
   
   

3. Cut each ball of dough into fourths. Roll each piece into a circle about the size of a dinner plate. 

4. Put a 1/2 cup or so of filling into the middle of each circle of dough circle. (You can add other things in at this point - pepperoni, olives, etc. - if you haven't already added them to the filling) Fold the dough circle in half and pinch the edges together tightly to make a wedge-shaped calzone. 

5. Press lightly on the calzone to squeeze the cheese down to the ends. 

6. Mix the egg yolks up with a little water and brush the egg wash over the top of the calzones. 

7. Grease and flour a large pan (or use corn meal or bread crumbs instead of flour). Lay the calzones on the pan, leaving some room for them to expand a bit. 

8. Bake about 18 minutes, until the tops are golden brown. Serve with hot marinara sauce for dipping.  

Christopher Alles, aged 33, is the father of five kids under the age of five, including triplet girls aged 2. So you might think he was describing his home life when he said it’s “everything everywhere all at once.”

But he was actually speaking about art and how to understand it.

“You have multiple things going on at the same time, and it takes a while to get comfortable managing them: Composition, representation, abstract form, the expressiveness of the character. You have to be juggling everything at the same time,” he said.

The New York-based sculptor sometimes feels the magnitude of that “everything everywhere all at once” task on a cosmic scale, especially when he’s carving; and it’s an experience he finds immensely satisfying.

“You’re taking something that’s meaningless and incoherent, and bringing order, separating things,” he said.

He describes forming a sculpted foot, first separating it from the base of the statue, then forming the front and sides of the foot like simple walls that gradually take on definition and meaning.

“It’s like God separating the land and the water. You’re making distinctions. Gradually things come together,” he said.

But if Alles shares in God’s creative process, he’s definitely not omniscient like God, or totally in control of what he’s making.

“As you go along, things change and emerge. You feel like you’re not in charge,” he said.

There is a mysterious element to making art, and even as he proceeds along the thoughtful and laborious process from making sketches, to miniature clay figures, to full-size armatured clay sculptures, to mold, to final cast poured in resin and marble, he’s sometimes surprised at how various elements work themselves out.

He points to a recent secular commission, “Apollo and Daphne,” a startlingly explosive figurative piece that seems to fly out from a central point suspended in the air, rather than from the ground.

“The composition was just playing around. The sort of geometric form of angles and lines just sort of emerged; it was spontaneous,” he said.

It invites the viewer to feel, rather than just see, the tension between the energies of the covetous god and the hapless nymph, who becomes rooted in the earth as a tree to escape his assault.

But Alles focuses mainly on sacred art, and he recognizes that another thing that’s out of his control is what the viewer actually sees.

“It’s hard, as an artist, to see your own work in the way other people see it,” said Alles. “Other people read things into my work that I didn’t see.”

Alles recalls a statue of St. Joseph with the young Jesus…Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Photo courtesy of Chris Alles 

I’m happy to announce that the winner of the Kitchen Rosary from The Woodshop at Avalon is Kim Pepper! Her name was chosen randomly from everyone who entered. Thanks to everyone who entered, and thanks to The Woodshop At Avalon for sponsoring this giveaway!

If you didn’t win, you can still order one of their beautiful abacus-style kitchen rosaries

and while you’re at it, use the 10% discount code: Enter in SMALLS24 when you check out, and you will get 10% off. The code is good until Dec. 7, 2024.

Dec. 7 is also the last day to order custom goods, so check it out! They make a variety of handcrafted goods for your Catholic home or office, for babies, and for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. A very popular item right now is the simple but clever prayer card holder, which is only $9.99. 

This size fits on most windowsills, and you can just pop in a prayer card to display the saint of the day, or keep a memorial card in it, etc. It even has storage, so the cards you’re not using won’t get lost or wrecked. You can have it engraved with “ora pro nobis” or “pray for us,” and it comes in three different finishes and two sizes. You can also order four beeswax votive candles directly from the site. 

Don’t forget to use your discount code! Yay, small business! 

Ah, Thanksgiving, when everyone’s kitchen goes into overdrive, turning out goodies and sweets to keep the nation’s tummies merry and bright.

But sooner or later, every busy baker and clever cook is bound to hit a snag: The recipe calls for an ingredient you simply don’t have. You thought the bottle of vanilla was fresh, but it’s almost empty. You could have sworn the carton was full, but only one or two eggs remain. What to do?

You could send your husband to the convenience store to get gouged. Everyone enjoys that, especially Yogi, who is doing the gouging. (This is not racist. His name is Yogi and boy does he gouge.) Or, you could put on your thinking toque and rustle up a substitute.

A substitute! Good kitchen sense means thinking on your feet, and substitutes are the backbone of baking, unless you are, in fact, cooking a backbone, and you are out of backbone. Then you’re out of luck. 

Here are some of my most-used kitchen substitutions:

Short on eggs? Substitute 1/4 cup of unsweetened applesauce for each egg you’re missing. Or you could swap in half a mashed banana. Just don’t think too hard about why it’s okay to use banana, which is stuffed with sucrose, but the substitution guides always specify unsweetened applesauce. Baking is a science, okay? And science means you shut up. If you don’t have apples or bananas or eggs, you could always use arrowroot powder. I won’t tell you how much, because we all know you don’t have arrowroot powder. Dude, you don’t even have eggs. 

Recipe calls for buttermilk but you’re fresh out? The next best thing is a scant cup of regular milk with a tablespoon of vinegar stirred in. Let it sit for five minutes before stirring, to give the ghost of your grandmother a chance to sidle in and make that sucking noise she makes when you did something stupid; then continue cooking as normal. *kshhh*

Sour cream and yogurt are very often interchangeable, so feel free to swap them in and out. In and out! You could even use cottage cheese. In and out, up and down, side-side-side-side-side! You could even try mayonnaise, as long as there are enough other strong ingredients to mask the flavor. Few people know this, but mayonnaise is actually made of cheese. A dairy product, if you will. Yes it is. Why is it cheese-colored, then? 

Recipe calls for unsalted butter, but all you have is salted? Get over yourself. No one cares. What is this for, cookies? Your cookies are rubbery little wrinkled dough puddles with hair in them. Gray hair. People are buying them at the bake sale solely to remove them from public view. The salt ratio being marginally out of balance is not what’s going to make or break your project, bunky. 

Springform pan gone missing? Try taking a normal pan and lining it with tinfoil, then putting little pebbles from the stream all along the inside. Crimp the tinfoil along the top end and fashion little vents with a melon baller, then pour the batter over that with a wry little twisting motion of the wrist while looking in the other direction and pretending not to notice what is happening. It won’t do anything, but at least you could try. Try putting your husband’s car keys in there. Put Meow Mix, see if I care.

A little low on flour? Try this trick: Slowly tear the pages out of your most infuriating cookbook with all the precious details about a frugal but free-spirited childhood in Soho, and stuff them into the food processor. Add a little truffle oil, pulse two or three times, and boom. You’ll have an excuse to go to the Salvation Army and pick yourself out a new food processor. While you’re out, you can get some flour. 

Lost your will to live? Try eating, instead. 

Hope this helps, and happy baking! *kshhh*