Christmas Day 2013

We’re having a different kind of Christmas at the Hectic Household this year. Instead of having our big family meal (60-120 folks depending on the year), we’re only going to have our immediate family here for the meal on Christmas day (10 of us this year, including Hectic Grandma). We’ll have the larger meal on Saturday the 28th.

This modification in our annual routine made things much more leisurely, but in some ways it seems odd. I’ve had much more time to think about the menu for the entire day for Christmas itself, the intervening days, and the big family celebration.

So this morning we started off with a Slow Cooker Christmas Casserole. The Hectic Family isn’t really big on eggs in their breakfast casseroles, so this one took a little bit of work (and some silence on my part when asked about the actual ingredients). It’s perfectly acceptable to forget to mention an ingredient that isn’t a family favorite, right?

The best part of this casserole in the slow cooker is that you can let it cook on warm overnight and then turn the heat up to low about an hour before serving. The red and green bell peppers give the casserole a very festive look, and the fact that it’s in the slow cooker allows a lot of flexibility on when you actually eat this breakfast dish.

With our dual celebration, we opted for a spiral sliced ham for our immediate family meal. I bought the ham already sliced, so all I would have to do was heat it up. That sounded fine. My biggest fear with any ham, but especially a spiral sliced ham is that it will dry out. I’ve read the directions on lots of these hams, and they’re pretty much the same. The biggest trick to keeping a ham from drying out is to keep it securely covered in foil for the majority of the cooking.

Because we have several mashed potato lovers in the house, and our big celebration won’t have them, I decided to make mashed potatoes from scratch. I have 1.5 pounds of russet potatoes and about 0.5 pounds of red potatoes. I didn’t get to use my trick of washing the potatoes in the dishwasher, since we already had a load going, so I had to wash by hand. I got the potatoes washed and quartered and started them boiling.

Everything was going fine until I decided that I would mash the potatoes with our hand mixer. I’ve done it before lots of times. For whatever reason (maybe the red potatoes contributed) this darned process took almost two hours. I’m not talking about a few minutes of active work, then doing something else, then back to mashing. I mean two hours of using the hand mixer to mash the potatoes. Needless to say, my entire cooking schedule was off…and the potatoes got cold while I was mashing them, so I had to use a combination of microwave reheating accompanied by reheating in the conventional oven. And the darned things really weren’t that hot when they hit the table. I’m still not sure what’s wrong with these From Scratch Mashed Potatoes.

The one good thing about the mashing process (in addition to the final product, of course) is that my Sunbeam Heritage Hand Mixer held up like a champ. Having the ability to set this device down in the stand and have the beaters sit over the mashed potatoes makes it a lot less messy. It’s also pretty lightweight, so I was able to hold it the entire time. The variable speed has always worked great, so I think my issues with the potatoes today had more to do with pilot error (and possibly lack of concentration) rather than the mixer.

Having kids home from college also has some perks, especially in the kitchen. My daughters really miss cooking, and they will often jump right in with ideas and recipes within a day or two of arriving home. Today was no exception, and one of my daughters came up with a recipe for French Cheese Puffs. As is often the case, especially on the actual day of a holiday, we had to do a lot of substituting to come anywhere close to the recipe she had in mind. The results were spectacular though!