Bowls, bowls, all type a bowls

This long holiday weekend has been filled with all the best things. Food, family, friends, relaxation, too many desserts, movies, a giant ball made out of cheese, the major kick-off to the holiday season, being able to do everything Christmas boldly and without fear. A few highlights, in lazy, holiday weekend format.

- My cousins and I spent Thanksgiving singing the latest SNL viral short Back Home Ballers. Particularly "bowls, bowls, all type a bowls". I think the best part was when we went to bed on Thanksgiving night at my aunt and uncle's, I texted my cousin that line and she responded with pictures of bowls that she had taken all over the house that day. I love having cousins nearby. 

A mere portion of the feast. Not pictured: bowls of candy, nuts, and napkin rings.

- I have a huge family. Most of them are on the east coast. We facetimed with at least three different groups, all of whom showed us the ten-ish inches of snow outside. Meanwhile, it was 90 degrees and we ate with all the doors and windows open, and the fans on. 

- I wore these on Thanksgiving and got a lot of compliments. They're on sale, which is good, as I don't think they're worth their full price. 

Photo from nordstrom.com.

- I felt smart for wearing stretchy yet stylish pants. Also, I thought of Joey.

- The Macy's parade was so disappointing, wasn't it? Man. What a letdown. I don't remember it being quite that commercial in years past. There were so few balloons, and the whole thing felt like a giant ad. I know there's always been an element of that, but it was way too much and it just ruined it for me. I think this is the last year I'll watch. 

- I saw Mockingjay yesterday with my friend Ginger. The movie was great, and I didn't even mind that much that it was only part one. Admittedly, it's been a while since I read the books so the details are a bit hazy, but I thought they did a good job with it. 

-The theater we went to serves beer, has full-on recliners, and you can reserve your seats ahead of time online. It's also 21+ only. I am never seeing a movie any other way again, if I can help it. The beer was great and the seats were great and the no kids was great, but what really got me was the seat reservations. I typically arrive at the theater 30 minutes before showtime to ensure I get a good seat and can get comfortable. I get kind of anxious about it. Knowing I had a perfect seat reserved was a gamechanger. 

- I am not used to a warm weather holiday season, and I don't think I'm going to get used to it. At least not this year. It is hard for this northeasterner to get into the spirit when holiday decor is juxtaposed against palm trees, and we're still wearing shorts and going for bike rides. It's a harder adjustment than I'd realized. But I have to say, going through the motions helps. It's chilly enough at night to light the fire, and yesterday I got my holiday cards delivered. I sat writing them out with Home Alone playing and a fire roaring. Sure, I had to keep the doors and windows open so I wouldn't die of heat stroke, but let's not split hairs. 

- I haven't done holiday cards since 2010. I'm pretty excited to send them out this year. 

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving that was exactly what you needed it to be. 

Friday Find: Holiday Music: It's full of food

This is kind of a cop-out on a Friday Find, but I am just SO EXCITED that this season is officially upon us! This is a post I wrote and originally posted on FoodLush a few years ago. I've edited and modified it.

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Thanksgiving is over! It's time to be unapologetically full of THE OTHER HOLIDAYS. 

I have an obsession with Christmas, and Christmas music, and Christmas food, and also regular food. And maybe you've noticed, but they overlap. In the obvious ways, sure, but have you noticed how often food is sung about in holiday songs? Because I have and I want to talk about it.

Let's examine some favorites shall we?

1. Sleigh Ride. 

Obviously the only good version is sung by Johnny Mathis. Give it a listen and just try not to feel jaunty and festive. Personally, it makes me want to dance like Kristen Wiig, which is high praise in my book.

If you've never heard Johnny Mathis's Christmas albums, get thee to iTunes and get thee some of that retro crooning. It's perfect.

My favorite part of the song is where they talk about passing around the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

a) Pumpkin pie is delicious (so is coffee) and b) It seems kind of rebellious as pumpkin pie is clearly a fall food, not a Christmas food. When I hear that lyric, I always wonder if people do eat pumpkin pie at their winter celebrations post-Thanksgiving. Do you? It certainly would seem that Johnny is in good company, given that pumpkin pie is also mentioned in Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.

2. My Favorite Things.

I am partial to the Barbra Streisand version on her Christmas album, which is aptly titled "A Christmas Album". I didn't know this was a Christmas song, but it must be if it's on that album. Here we have crisp apple struedel, and schnitzel with noodle. 

Again I am confused. Apple struedel? Really? Admittedly I do not know how the Von Trapps and Fruelein Maria did things in Austria, but aren't apples more of a fall food? How DID this become a holiday song anyway? The lyrics also mention rain. As we all know, the only festive precipitation is snow, so I continute to be confused all around by this song. 

3. The Christmas Song.

Bold and daring, this song puts it all out there right in the title. This is THE Christmas song. Therefore I'm willing to accept at face-value anything it claims. The chesnuts are roasting on an open fire. "Everybody knows, a turkey and some mistletoe..." Bam. Suddenly turkey isn't just for Thanksgiving. 

4. The 12 Days of Christmas.

Pear trees, partridges, maids-a-milking, geese-a-laying. So many foodstuffs I can hardly count....count. Eh? Ehh?

5. We Wish You a Merry Christmas

Figgy Pudding! A fictitious Christmas food only available in classic Charles Dickens stories.

6. Baby It's Cold Outside. 

A problematic song featuring drinks, and a woman wondering what a man has put in her drink as he doesn't accept no for an answer. I hate this song. Every time I hear it I think, oh, it can't be THAT bad, then, nope, it just keeps getting worse. 

7. Let It Snow.

He or she brought some corn for popping! Festive!

8. Frosty the Snowman. 

He has a corncob pipe, so.

9. The Hannukah Song. 

There aren't many Hannukah songs, but this one is really in it to win it, with it's love for gin and tonics. There's also mention of the Carnegie Deli, and I think we can agree a pound of pastrami with a piece of bread perched precariously on top makes a damn good sandwich. 

10. Marshmallow World. 

The entire song revolves around corny food jokes. It's a marshmallow world, a whipped cream day. I get excited every time the Target commercial featuring this song is played.

11. Here We Come A-wassailing. 

According to Wikipedia, which quotes Readers Digest: "the Christmas spirit often made the rich a little more generous than usual, and bands of beggars and orphans used to dance their way through the snowy streets of England, offering to sing good cheer and to tell good fortune if the householder would give them a drink from his wassail bowl or a penny or a pork pie or, let them stand for a few minutes beside the warmth of his hearth. The wassail bowl itself was a hearty combination of hot ale or beer, apples, spices and mead, just alcoholic enough to warm tingling toes and fingers of the singers"

It doesn't get more festive than pork pies, warm spiced alcohol, and begging British street urchins. 

God bless us, every one. 

Five things

My sweet, tough, fellow gin-loving friend Hillary tagged me in a post, and challenged me to write five things that you may not know about me. I am a sucker for things like this, as you might have suspected. I am always bad at keeping track of what I've told to whom, though, so I have no idea if these are things you already know. At any rate, here goes.

1. I love food and cooking and all kinds of cuisines. But that wasn't always the case. Until I was about 15 (or maybe later, I'm not quite sure), I would pretty much only eat burgers in restaurants. Pasta or chicken fingers were fine, too, but I really didn't know what to do with myself if there wasn't a burger on a menu. The first time I went out for Thai food, I ordered some kind of grilled chicken and asked for it plain. I was totally missing out! Now I eat just about anything with glee. 

2. I was a big athlete as a kid. I played softball and basketball for years and years, and was completely obsessed with gymnastics up until I was 12 or 13. I did handstands and round-offs wherever I went. 

3. I love the first bite of anything triangular. Pie, pizza, cake: there is something beautiful and perfect about that first, perfect, triangular little bite (running out of adjectives here). My husband sometimes lets me have his, which is how you know this is true love. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that it's pie season.

4. When I was little, I was always cooking and experimenting. When I grew up I wanted to have a shop called Caitlin's Candy Corner. My mom would help me in the kitchen and my handy Dad would help me build all the shelves and display cases. It was a pretty solid business plan, if you ask me. 

5. When I was around 3, I told my Mom I wanted to learn another language. She's not sure where I got that idea, but she somehow found me some French language tapes (not bad for the suburban, pre-internet 80s). I don't remember that, exactly, but I do remember wishing I could talk to anyone, no matter what language they spoke, and spending time thinking about that. I also longed for a notebook (I didn't know that was what they wwere called), to write in. I kept opening my books, hoping they would somehow suddenly contain blank paper. They didn't, so I settled for scribbling in a Strawberry Shortcake book. I can't say that my love for languages, reading, and writing has changed much, though I no longer deface reading material. I majored in Spanish, studied abroad in Spain for a year, came home and started studying German (my brain had a very hard time switching from English to German without first stopping on Spanish. I might be the only native English speaker who spoke German with a Castillian accent.), and I came very close to going to a grad program for linguistics. I got in but didn't go, for various reasons, and now I'm here. Isn't it funny how we can trace some things back?