About Us

We just decided to stay home. It was grey (again) and snowing (still) outside and there was much work to do: First we opened presents: I got a nice shirt & tie, some chocolate, a jar of genuine Swedish Lok Sill and promises of more in the mail; Patti got a mini digital camera. Santa brought us a Scrabble game and the PBS series "The Appalachians" on DVD. Can't wait to see that!

Onward to dinner: Make the stuffing, cook the turkey, mash the potatoes, decant the cranberry sauce, reduce the gravy and bake the pumpkin pie,. What fun. Oh do let me indulge you on ALL the details:

First, we used cornbread stuffing right out of the box. This was a salute to tradition because Patti doesn't like stuffing anyway, so making a big deal of the stuffing would be a homage to one (me). Onward to the turkey - a genuine 13-pound American ButterBall, lightly stuffed and trussed, and baked under its little aluminum hat for 3-1/2 hours until just falling apart! For the gravy, I minced the giblets added the neck and a few chicken hearts saved from a recent dinner of chicken livers, stoked it with wine, stock and dried porcinis, and boiled it down for four hours. The mashed potatoes were a paean to my Scandanavian father's specialty called "root moos" which is a blend of mashed root vegetables, mostly rutabaga. There are no rutabagas here, so we made do with potatoes and turnips blended with butter and cream. A pot of fresh (!) frozen green peas added the requisite green to the plate.

The local variety of pumpkin here is a wonder to taste. It's the rich color of golden orange, with few seeds and no strings in the meat. We usually mash the cooked meat and blend it with cream and spices for a winter soup. But for Christmas, I mashed and drained the meat, added it to a mix of milk & heavy cream, dumped in egg and the spices, added some walnut bits for crunch, and poured the whole concoction into a fresh-made pastry shell where it baked for 45 minutes. Pretty good, though not as dense nor sweet as I like. I've had better.

Dinner for two was served at 5pm. We opened a black-red bottle of Brunello Chianti from Montalcino in the hills of Tuscany and finished it with dinner. Candles provided the light. The Cambridge Boys choir provided the music. The song of the silent city could be heard thru the barely-opened windows, and once even the Mullah joined in.

After dinner, we made a half-dozen phone calls (over the internet) to our friends and family in the USA. A memorable Christmas in Sarajevo..