Cacciatore
The working mama’s savior – the slow cooker. Friday night our dear friends Katie & Matt came over for a “holiday” dinner. Since dinner was planned for apres work and I wasn’t able to take the day off to prepare, I turned to my All-Clad slow cooker.
Earlier in the week, I bought a FABULOUS cookbook at one of my favorite cooking shops. What makes is fabulous is that it is divided into three sections: 15-minutes hands on time, 30-minute hands on time, made for extras.
So for our dinner, I decided upon Chicken Cacciatore (Hunter’s Chicken, in Italian, I think). Thursday night I prepped the veggies. Friday am, I browned the chicken, made the sauce, threw everything into the crock and that was it! (I was a bit worried that the slow cooker was going to short, and burn the house down, but it didn’t.) I got home, threw in the ‘shrooms, cooked some pappardelle and we were good to go.
It was a lovely evening, but no naked baby dance for entertainment, perhaps next time.
Lumpia
Saturday evening, my family got together for an early birthday/holiday celebration.
As always, there was way too much food. Roast Beef, Spiral Cut Ham and Lumpia. My grandma made a pretty mean lumpia and now my uncle is following in her footsteps. I only had two, but could have easily eaten 5 or 10!
We also had a mini-birthday celebration for my cousin’s daughter Kady, who turns 2 in a couple days. She had a delicious neopolitan cake from Goldilocks. Yum!
We did have a white elephant gift exchange, but IMHO the gifts were, eh. Next year, we’ll have to require the gifts to be items people actually want.
Bouchon
As if Friday and Saturday weren’t enough, we headed down to Palo Alto for dinner Sunday night. (And S got to test his early xmas gift. Btw, I no way paid the price listed. Are you kidding? I could have gotten myself a nice gift at Burberry or elsewhere. But I digress.) Our friend G, made a wonderful dinner! So wonderful, Mads even enjoyed it! Mixed green salad with duck breast, pecans, followed by trout with green beans, roasted pearl onions & shallots and croutons, pommes anna, and ended with creme brulee and chocolate bouchons (I’ve talked about these before).
Mads really dug into the duck breast, trout and pommes anna (wasn’t too fond of the pearl onion, though) and especially LOVED the creme brulee and chocolate bouchon!
So, as I tackle another week of work, looking forward to the holidays and getting xmas shopping done!
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