I am very much looking forward to Christmas dinner tomorrow! There are going to be fourteen adults here, and I am not stressed a single bit--does that mean I've grown up? :-) I'm even going to set two tables, which really makes me feel that I've arrived.
We had a lovely Christmas Eve at Jennifer & Stepan's house. Funny--it turns out the Lucios are no more biddable than the Karls, much to Stepan's good-natured dismay. The whole evening was joyful and convivial, and the fish-head soup was particularly tasty, I thought. Thanks for hosting it, J & S.
P.S. [five minutes later] I just read an article in the Daily Telegraph, an English newspaper, that says that extended family gatherings are on the way out and that at least a third of all Christmas gatherings this year in England will have no more than four people, and that only 25% of gatherings will include people beyond immediate family (children, parents, grandparents). The article goes on to say that "We are choosing to spend the day with the people who matter to us most and with people we can tolerate"--and that is true for me (and all of us, I surmise), and I'm so glad that's not limited to four people!
Yesterday Dale left for England, and Daddy arrived to keep us company while Dale is gone. Within ten minutes of Daddy's arrival, Kayleigh was all over him and firmly requesting that he pull up his shirt so she could better examine his tummy. (He dutifully did so.) For most of the rest of the day, she spent the majority of her time with him--helping him bring things in from the truck, playing out in the back garden where he fed her oatmeal with blueberries for dinner, bringing him books to read and insisting on sitting in Dale's chair to do so. After she had gone to sleep and I was putting the finishing touches on dinner (fresh bread, spaghetti with homemade sauce--although I did get a shocked exclamation from my dad wanting to know what in the h*** I'd done to my spaghetti when he saw that it was whole wheat), Daddy--flopped out in the recliner--commented that she certainly didn't stop very much, did she? No, that's right. She doesn't stop very much at all!
Thanks to the generosity of Stepan and the memory of Jennifer, I have borrowed the baking stone that Stepan used to use before acquiring his HearthKit. It's fun experimenting with making different kinds of bread and moving into the hand-formed loaves rather than those baked in a pan. I've made a peasant boule, foccacia, and rosemary pepper bread (yummy). Last night I attempted to make baguettes to go along with our spaghetti, but I was less than delighted with the results. (Although, since it was fresh bread, it tasted fine.) For one thing, the recipe made enough bread for an army--and too much for the baking stone. I need a bigger one (or two)! Also, now I understand why The Baker's Catalogue sells rising aids for French and Italian loaves as well as boules, because mine certainly looked like someone had come along and sat on them--they didn't rise up but instead rose out, so to speak. I shall have to try again. I think I have figured out how to shape dough into a boule, though; the technique sounds complicated when reading it, but the second time I tried it on the rosemary pepper bread, I understood what was going on. Little by little I improve.