Eating and Laughing

I think those two words pretty much sum up my entire Christmas vacation at home (even though I've lived in Baltimore for 5.5 years now, I still refer to the house I grew up in as "home"). Spending time with my family results in near constant laughter which is why I love it so much.



My sister and I, trying to make funny faces for a picture but it took like 7 tries because we kept hysterically laughing.

Going through all the many kinds of delicious food I ate during Christmas break would take an entire novel, so I'll just mention some highlights.

• Christmas Eve dinner - we just do appetizers in my family, which is awesome. My mom's spinach/artichoke dip is just basically heaven. In addition to eating my weight in it that night, my lunch for the following five days was pretty much broccoli + copious amounts of spin dip. At least I got the broccoli in there (plus spinach is good for you, right?). She made a huge pan of it and I'm pretty sure I demolished at least 97.4% of it over a five day period. We have a family tradition of forgetting to take a picture of the spread, but just picture a huge table full of all your favorite appetizers. New this year was three kinds of stuffed mushrooms (brought to us by Vince & Darcy) and that was a fantastic idea. My contribution was mainly ourselves (we had to work a full day the 23rd so we arrived in Rochester just in time for dinner on the 24th) but I did bring all my leftover cakeballs. I had about three huge tupperwears full of them at my house and did not eat even one Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. You can just mail me my trophy, thanks.
  
• Christmas morning quiche with homemade crust (by Mom). I'll let the picture speak for itself.
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• Christmas dinner - the star was roasted brussel sprouts with homemade pomegranate molasses and vanilla pecan butter (again by Mom). Um, ridiculously good.
• Another Christmas tradition (and we have a LOT) is forgetting to put out at least one present. This year it was the lottery tickets that Santa always leaves in our stockings. He put them in my mom's purse by mistake so after a boys/girls movie night (Tron for the boys, The King's Speech for the girls) she found them at dinner. Santa gave her a BIG WINNER! Not enough to go shopping for a BMW, but more than a traditional lottery winning and more than anyone I know ever one. So, we celebrated with this:

Shortbread topped with raspberry filling and chocolate ganache on top. From Wegmans. Even better than it sounds. Darcy and I had small pieces combined with pieces of leftover pumpkin cheesecake with cinnamon whipped cream (our homemade, again by Mom, Christmas dessert) which basically equals a plate full of heaven. Plus a glass of milk. MMM I wish this was in my life again. We even got a little baby one for my grandma.

• My dad is Jewish, so we didn't get to celebrate Hanukkah with him, as it fell really early this year :(. Sometimes it overlaps with Christmas, not this time though. We met him for a belated Hanukkah/birthday (his, Dec. 12) dinner at The King and I, an amazing Thai place. It's right by the Starbucks I used to work at and I miss going to dinner there with my old coworkers. Our appetizer was crispy squid tentacles. We all laughed when he suggested it, but then it turned out to be pretty good! I'll try almost anything once.

Eric ordered a dish called "Evil Jungle Prince Chicken" - we all thought it would be super spicy, but it wasn't at all? It was some kind of creamy coconut sauce though, and I really wish it didn't have the chicken, I would have stolen way more than I did!

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All in all, a delicious, wonderful, stay in Rochester and a great Christmas - as it always is.

Random ending note: This lady was at a Sheetz on our way up with this bird just perched on her finger like that, which we found hilarious.