The most undocumented cookie season ever

Here it is Christmas Day, very happy merry to all! and I am just now getting to the party/cookie season wrap up.

[probably] Needless to say, I did not take any pictures of cookie platters when I was making them for the pandemic-style party, with people coming in shifts, all eating & drinking upstairs, cookie-box packing downstairs, all of which meant far fewer platters. One big one for the first shift and a second one that I planned to use to replenish for the second shift, plus a gluten free platter.

I also didn’t take any pictures of the cookie platters I made for our family Christmas Eve celebration, pizza and leftover cookies while watching Love Actually, with the addition this year of the Ted Lasso Christmas episode that references Love Actually all over the place. We had an includes-nuts, and a nut-free platter. There were two flavors of pizza: 1) pepperoni, purple onion, and fresh tomato; 2) Corn mixed with a bit of homemade mild salsa, bacon, and pepper jack.

Christmas Eve was also the day I got all the cookies out of the vestibule, and good thing too, because it’s just not staying cold. We had a weird random 60° day, the Wednesday before the party, must’ve been December 15th, 2021, 60° on December 15th. And Christmas Eve it got up to about 45° and today even though the high was supposed to be only in the 30s, it is now 40.

I’m feeling like I have way too many cookies left: there’s two buckets full of random bagged cookies, pecan snowballs, spiced honey bars, fig bars, Rose’s crescents. And at least 3/4 full bucket each of springerle, baby fruitcakes, and the chocolate-covered fruit nut balls from Molly Wizenberg’s Homemade Life (although seems like she now is leading a rather different life, that does still include writing, maybe less about food).

My first half formed thoughts while I was still in bed on Christmas morning were all about, “oh jeez, what am going to do with all these cookies?” It’s so much harder to share food in pandemic. But once I got up, I realized that the full-size fruitcake I baked in 2020 froze beautifully until this year, and despite the fact that the word is full of fruit cake haters, all the slices of fruit cake, each with its rosette of hard sauce, that I put on the cookie platters for the party, got eaten. So I transferred the baby fruit cakes in to a smaller, better-fitting bucket, less air space, and froze them – there are 46. So maybe I just won’t make those next year, or more likely, only a small batch. The fruit nut balls should be OK in the back of the fridge until I teach a cooking class in early February on mini desserts for Valentine’s Day, and they can be on the munchies platter I have for people at the beginning of that class. The random bagged cookies can come with me to the food pantry the next time I go, for volunteers to grab. The springerle I guess I’ll just have to eat, slowly – but I have done that other years, and usually end up finishing them in February. Everything else is small containers of stuff the family likes.

So what did we eat at the party? Many of the old standards with some significant omissions (no pepperoni roll, no shrimp, no roasted squash quesadillas, no crackers and cheese, no hot dips, like spinach, artichoke, or buffalo chicken) and just less of everything.

There was:

• Veggies with a bowl of ranch dip and a bowl of peanut dip – with spoons to encourage people to serve themselves an individual puddle of dip onto their plates instead of dipping veggies into the main server;
• Leek confit & goat cheese crostini (that fell apart a lot but I think were liked – they were eaten!);
• Bacon wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese;
• Puff pastry, Brie cheese & cranberry sauce bites;
• Salami & cheese on a stick, sliced salami wrapped around cubes of cheddar. I was going to do olive & peppadew & cheese for vegetarians but didn’t get around to it;
• Little wieners in dough;
• Spanakopita;
• Deviled eggs – I boiled 20 eggs, in contrast to the usual 4 dozen or so;
• Tea sandwiches, zucchini bread with cream cheese, and whole wheat bread with olive walnut spread;
• Chex mix – to be spooned into individual custard cups;
• Hot ham and cheese buns – first time trying these, they are mainly assembly – you buy the buns and sliced meat and cheese, and assemble, and pour a butter-mustard-Worcestershire mixture over, and bake. Half a stick of butter per every 12 buns. You were also supposed to put garlic salt into the butter mixture and sprinkle with poppy seeds – I omitted the garlic salt and sprinkled with everything bagel topping. Definitely a keeper.

I went for a walk this morning and ran into some friends who asked how I was surviving pandemic, and quickly amended that to enduring. We had cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning, with Al & Emma, and Mark and Maja and me opening presents, that ran to a lot of local products.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.