Third Anniversary

We got a special bottle of wine for our anniversary:

Huge. Huge! Prunes, earth, olives, cherries. The finish lasts for weeks, I tell you.
I got some flowers, too.

While I was cooking, Lindz snapped some closeups of said flowers.


I was dealing with these guys:

After the meat met the heat:

I roasted some red potatoes on the Quantum Leap of Potato Technology Pan.

Medium Rare.

Among other important reasons, this is why you stay married.

Merry Christmas

Yeah, you read it right. I said "Merry Christmas," not "Happy Holidays."

This was my brother's first North Carolina Christmas. He has been elevated in status because my wife made him a stocking:

He made our Christmas Eve even more merry by bringing Ollie over, complete with a red collar. Christmas cat is a decadent yuletide treat.

I made some pain a l'ancienne, a delayed-fermentation bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice:

The dough sits overnight in the refrigerator. I made boules for Christmas dinner.

Here they are, fresh out of the oven (by the way, these pics were taken with our new, impossibly tiny, fabulously feature-laden digital camera given to us by Lindz's folks):

And here is how the boules were used. Bryan made a rich seafood newburg (full of scallops, shrimp and crab), and we put it in bread bowls. It was delicious, and it brought back memories of Christmases past. We drank a tasty Rutz pinot noir with it.

Bryan, in his Christmastime extravagance, made the mythical Bee Pie. Lindz has heard about this pie for years now, and Bryan decided to bring forth the legend so she could actually have some.

She liked it. By the end, we were full and dazed in that old-timey Noel way.

Stollen

There's toasted walnuts, raisins and candied orange peel, lemon peel and pineapple in there.

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Bryan hung out with us at our house today. We did some cooking. Lindz and I had bought a big bag of Bosc pears at Costco, so Bryan made a Pear Cranberry pie. It was delicious. The cranberries were a nice foil to the sweet pears, and the all-butter crust was textbook perfect- flavorful, luxurious and flaky. If the shortening in my pantry hadn't gone bad with age, we might have had a more ordinary crust. Shortening can be more predictable in pastry work, but butter has better flavor. In the middle of this day of cooking, we had a treat that reminded us of our childhood- we ate the scraps of pie dough, baked on a sheet pan with sugar and cinnamon. It was some goodass crap. We ate some pie after dinner- I made marinated salmon with roasted red pepper coulis and mushroom risotto, and Lindz made a salad of baby greens, pears, toasted pine nuts, feta and mustard vinaigrette. We drank a tasty Ripasso from Trader Joe's, and then we watched Anchorman- the Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Simple pleasures. A big shopping trip and a bunch of cooking. We live large here in Raleigh.