Holiday Eating is my Nemesis

I

imp

Senior Member
During the year, I pretty much exercise care in not living up to my gluttonous reputation. The holidays this year will entail no gathering of friends or relatives for us. What do we get in the mail? Invitation from the Edgewater Hotel for free Thanksgiving dinner, as well as Christmas Eve dinner! One would think we must gamble away zillions there; we don't. Since we have no plans, no visitors from back east, we will take them up on the meals.

Only thing I'll miss, is that juicy big, microwaved turkey that has become a tradition with us on Thanksgiving for years now. Deb is talking about buying one anyway, maybe cooking it up on Thanksgiving weekend. Now, if my nephew, Mike, comes down here from Flagstaff, the "cold-country", that would put a different spin on all this!

What projections, plans, have you for these upcoming holidays? imp
 

I am renaming Christmas "Peppermint-Bark Holiday", followed by the former New Year, which will now be referred in my house as "Can't-Get-In-My-Jeans-Because-Of-Peppermint-Bark Holiday". Somebody always sends me a huge box of it and I make a huge pig of myself over it. And I put on at least five pounds. Damned Peppermint Bark. Why can't they send me Limburger Cheese or Haggis?
 
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I bake every Xmas. Friends and family expect Xmas goody plates. Complaints about my advancing age and incipient decrepitude fall on deaf ears. Sigh. Consequently, after approx ten days on the butter and sugar dessert diet, I inevitably gain

ten pounds. It usually takes at least two to three months to lose it. But hey, it's worth it!! Brown sugar fudge is a food group according to my kids!
 

"incipient decrepitude"

Wowee! And here I've been suffering under the delusion you rarely joked! Seriously, is it really ten pounds? That's a lot of goodies!

As a youngster, my Mother labored at Christmas just as you describe. Favorites? Golf-ball sized soft, chocolaty cake dough, I think actually baked, containing chopped pecans. Something she called "Toffee Dessert", neither toffee, nor dessert, it was frozen in those old-fashioned metal ice-cube trays, minus their lattice of wiggly dividers. I have her recipe for it, will try to find it. Some may even venture forth and try it. Just delicious! imp
 
I will try any goody recipe you share Imp. I am so flattered that you have discovered that occasionally I risk shedding my moldy snakeskin of earnest pomposity, and venture into the unknown halls of levity. I am certain no one else has noticed......
 
Someone like Yogi Berra once said, "You can see a lot of things if you look."

I look a lot, but age's dimming of my "sights" now tends to cahst a veil over the real beauty of it. imp
 
Many years ago, I inherited from my grandmother the job of producing the family fruitcakes. Holy Minced Candied Kumquat, Batman.....what a job THAT was. If one has never baked a traditional fruitcake, one cannot appreciate the amount of love it takes for one's family for a solitary woman to produce 10 large fruitcakes without sticking her head in the oven or leaving town without a forwarding address.

I would start at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday night in October and essentially chop, mince, sift, mix, stir, pour and bake until midnight on Sunday. As each cake took 3-4 hours to bake and you cannot bake more than one at a time (unless you want your grandmother's ghost to appear and hit you with a mixing spoon), I baked around the clock. The cost of the ingredients alone rank up there with the GNP of a developing nation. The burns on your hands and arms from wrestling the heavy pans in and out of the oven will be with you for life. Then you have lovingly wrap them in cheesecloth, put them in tins and faithfully tend them like a mother hen until Christmas, soaking them down periodically with brandy or rum (OK, that part I liked....a cup for the fruitcake, a cup for me, a cup for the frootcake, a coup fer me, a copp for the flutecaik, a cope for...why am I on the floor?)

I did that for three years. Not to brag, but those were the Mack-Daddy of fruitcakes and even people who thought they disliked fruitcakes liked my fruitcakes. But after those three years, I told everyone that if they wanted fruitcakes for Christmas they could damn well get their damn asses out of their damn chairs and go make/buy/steal their OWN damn fruitcakes. Dammit.

Bah Humbug!
 
Shalimar said:
I gotcha Jujube. I still make them. Do you still have your recipe? I like the brandy part too. Mine contain cider also. Hic.....
Click to expand...

I will have to look and see if I slipped the copy into one of my old cookbooks, but if I remember correctly, I was last seen running naked around a bonfire in the back yard at midnight on a Sunday feeding pieces of the recipe into the flames. I think I made a pact with the devil that night.....something about fruitcakes or the lack of therein....
 
My high school friend Ron's Mom, traditionally made fruitcakes every year. They picked up LOADS of the fruit-stuff, I think it was packed in metal tins, and she was not to be interfered with in any way, while the pro-cess pro-gressed. Delicious! imp
 

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