happy holidays!

happy holidays and happy new year everyone! i hope everyone had a good christmas and enjoyed their time at home! christmas break is over and i'm back in vancouver :(  i thought i'd do a little updating as to what exactly went down during my looong 3.5 week christmas break. i had planned to do some hot yoga during that time... but clearly, making and eating copious amounts of food is such a better option. this is a very photo-filled blog post, so it might take a while to load!

first up and completely unrelated to food... phyllo the puppy looking so cute at christmas time! he's grown so much since we first got him and it's kind of scary. i can see the awkward sheltie stage starting to appear!

now for the real cooking stuff: a shout out to my apprentice, dad. he's my slave and i made him help me with basically everything (cleaning... holding.. lifting). i like to think i've taught him how to be better in the kitchen, but who knows.

the apprentice: seen here with pomegranate macaron shells

next up, the french macarons. i made two flavours: vanilla with pomegranate white chocolate ganache, and pomegranate with a white chocolate ganache. i used a turkish pomegranate syrup to flavour the shell and the ganache because i couldn't find powdered pomegranate.. no surprise there... now, they didn't come out perfectly, but the texture was still ommidy ommidy as it should be! i made the pink pomegranate ones first, and taking the advice from my first batch in the summer (pistachio ones here) i used a proper piping bag and nozzle. they turned out pretty well, i think i mixed the egg whites too much while trying to incorporate the food colouring and syrup in the pink ones. for the vanilla macarons i didn't add any food colouring and was careful to not over beat them, but i may have under beat them.. who knows. they all had their little feet, and all tasted yummy so it's all good!

so pretty!

next, and not quite as exciting, came the macaroons. sometimes i crave these like mad so i just had too. the tin of condensed milk was a bit old and had a weird colour, but i used it anyways.

after that came the himalayan pink salt caramels. it seems everything i have made so far has this weird white or pink colour scheme... and i don't even like pink. meh. anyways, these were super gooey and didn't stick to your mouth! i followed a recipe for nigella lawson's fleur de sel caramels but substituted the pink salt cause we had just bought some. super yum yum!

then we made some gingerbread cookies. christina and i used a new recipe for icing and... well it didn't turn out so well. some were too thick, some too thin, and by the end of it we were too annoyed to try and fix it. so, we decorated our cookies with crappy icing and it glooped everywhere. oh well.

christmas dinner started off with baked brie topped with caramelized onions and shrimp dip for appetizers. we had intended to do a roasted beet, goat's cheese and pecan salad but we were a bit behind on timing, so we left it for the next day. for the main we had turkey with stuffing, sweet yams, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. to go with all this om nomness, we made mulled wine or gluhwein, reminiscent of our holiday trip to germany, belgium and the netherlands a few years back.

for new years, we had vasilopita, a greek cakey-bready thing. i kind of ruined it this year because my curiosity got the best of me and i found the coin by using my physics smarts. as you will notice, the star in the middle is spread out and weird looking due to all my finger pokes. whatever, i still found it! the best way to eat this cake is to heat it up in the microwave, put a big scoop of vanilla icing with it, and mush it up with a fork. sounds gross but it's oh so delicious. i tend to eat a lot of things mushed up like that... awkward...

i also had a chance to use my new immersion blender (from santa) to make a delicious butternut squash soup with spicy chorizo bits. i am going to devote an actual blog post to this so... check back soon!

would you look at that colour!

well, that was a little snippet from my holidays. i hope everyone is settling back into school smoothly and that you all have a great year ahead!