new years weekend

the hanukah host
Originally uploaded by deepfry.

happy new years! this year, i was lucky enough to have nnnick come all the way from the east coast to celebrate new years and, ahem, bicker with me in the kitchen. as it turns out, we have very different cooking styles. namely, mine is right and his is wrong. ha! oh well, what can you do. i let him have his way a few times -- i mean, how can you say no to a man in a hostess apron and a chanukah hot mit? here he is realizing, one of many times, that my idea is better than his. things got a little tense when we had to be a somewhat creative in preparing a baked brie wedge served before heading to seth and annie's. words were had over how to stuff in the sun-dried tomatoes, whether to take off the rind and how to actually wrap the thing since the recipe described wrapping a round when we had but a triangle. but i think we're still friends.

we went to the stitch 'n bitch house to bring in the new year with obscene amounts of greek food, cooked by annie's visiting greek family: tzatziki, spanikopita, eggplant, greek salad, roasted veggies and lamb. not to mention baklava, prepared by chuck to my specifications (nuts ground so fine that they seem entirely un-nut-like). what a nice boy!

nick and i provided what turned out to be one of the highlights of the evening: the galette du rois. we'd first been assigned a traditional greek new years cake but annie's comment that "the new year's cakes are usually sort of bad" inspired us to make a go for, well, something that might actually taste decent. and, like the greek new year's cake, this french pastry, stuffed with almond filling, has a coin in it; the finder of the coin being the recipient of a year of good luck. preparing the pastry took two days, with many rounds of chilling and rolling out of dough. it was followed by scoring and then notching. here's nick notching the cake. . he did a very good job. my pinwheel scoring was also rather charming. sadly, the cake came out a bit overdone. i think that my oven cooks hot, since we kept it in at the absolute minimum time limit and still, well, see for yourself, the slightly blackened edges. luckily, my genius friend erin was over and suggested dusting it with powdered sugar. nobody noticed the charred bits...and i like to think that the burnt bit added a, um, slightly smokey flavor to the dish. right?

once at the party, watching annie cut the galette was pretty stressful. "No coin for you!" she's shout with each slice cut, having named the recipient of the slice shortly before cutting. in fact, she didn't get to the coin until only 1/5 of the galette remained. i remembered mixing the coin in with the filling, but i became, for a moment, absolutely convinced that the coin had disappeared. where? i don't know. maybe it had magically disolved into the filling? or somehow slipped out of the bottom when we'd transferred the thing for the pan to a plate. so many horrifying possibilities!! thankfully, it turned up. you can sort of see it sticking out of the piece in this picture. it went to some friends who weren't able to make it but who had slices cut in their absence, nonetheless. and the galette was rather tasty, if i may say so. and though six very slender slices were cut in honor of absent friends, only the one with the coin remained by the end ofd the evening. so nick and i did good. real good. we overcame adversity (in the form of each other and the burning incident) and triumphed over the galette.

aside from new years dinner, there was much weekend eating. we tried to go to the creepy clown-decorated ice cream parlor down the road from my house but, alas, it was closed. nnnick will have to return. having never been there, i'm sure its worth a cross-country trip!

so, happy new year to everyone! may all of your new years resolutions come true!