Christmas

Matt and I were very excited to spend our first Christmas together as husband and wife. Our first order of business was Christmas cards. With the help of Suzanne, our favorite stationary maven, we put together a pretty cool card with pictures from our honeymoon. And of course we had to throw a couple of hedgehogs on the envelopes!

Kissing hedgehogs under the mistletoe, how cute is that?

Second order of business: Christmas dinner. Matt and Mike decided that they wanted to organize a traditional Polish Christmas meal. We decided to split all the cooking between us kids since we were going to be making 12 dishes plus desserts.

Matt and I were in charge of making stuffed cabbage, Bigos Stew, mushroom barley soup, and biscuits in poppy seed milk. Gus & Violet were very excited to hang out in the kitchen with us all morning.

Yeah

Right

Matt's Bigos Stew takes 3 days to make. He adds a few ingredients each night, cooks it on the stove for a while, and then puts it in the fridge to let all the flavors mix together. He actually makes this every winter for us, so he was pretty excited to share it with the rest of the family.

We've made stuffed cabbage before but we decided to mix it up a little for this dinner. Instead of just using ground beef we mixed ground pork and ground lamb. It was delicious!

14 little cabbage rolls


The biscuits & poppyseed milk cooked up pretty quick and the most challenging thing about making the mushroom-barley soup was tracking down the barley. So once we were done we had to package everything up and drive it over to Bob & Betsy's. Matt came up with a genius way to keep the stew and soup from spilling in the car on the way over.

Polish Tupperware


Because this was a Lisowski Polish event, we had to put together a little grouping of holiday hedgehogs.

Hedgehog made from pinecones, hedgehog ornaments, and our hedgehog nativity.


We started the night with some horseradish vodka made by Joe, polish pickles, and rye bread. Then it was on to the main event.

Biscuits in Poppy Seed Milk

made by

Matt & I

&

Stuffed Eggs

made by

Mike

Pickled Herring
made by

Mike

Cranberry Horseradish

made by

Mike

Stuffed Cabbage

made by

Matt & I

Potato Pancakes

made by

Mike

Baked Saurkraut

made by

Mike

Every year our family friend Cookie and her daughter-in-law Maryanne get together the first or second weekend of December and make pierogi from scratch. They invited me to help last Christmas and the three of us made 460 pierogi. This year I invited Chrissie and Sherri along and after a full day and a couple bottles of wine, we made 840 pierogi!

Kraut & Potato Pierogi

made by

Chrissie, Sherri and I

Cheese Pierogi

made by

Chrissie, Sherri, and I

Catfish with Hardboiled Egg Sauce

made by Mike

Buffet line

Since 2010 brought us so many weddings and 2011 will be bringing more, we decided to forgo Christmas presents for everyone this year and just get things for Sherri's son Doug.

Beatles T-shirt

from

Mike

Paddington Bear book and pajamas

from

Matt and I

We all stuck to getting him clothes, books, shoes, and a pretty cool Spiderman watch (from Joe and Chrissie), because Doug had a big present waiting for him in the garage. When Doug finished opening what he thought were all his presents, Sherri took him to wash up for dessert. The rest of us snuck out to the garage and waited for him to find us.

Here is the video of his reaction

This jeep has seatbelts, an AM/FM radio and an iPod dock.

Out of control.

This is right before he ran over Joe

While the jeep was a pretty cool present, the gifts that Doug could not stop talking about his new cowboy boots and belt from Pat & Janice.

Once the present excitement died down we got started on dessert.

Apple & Blueberry Pierogi with Sweet Sour Cream

made by

Mike

Joe & Chrissie setting up their desserts

Chocolate-Peppermint Cake

&

Chocolate Brandy Pecan Pie

made by

Joe & Chrissie

Shortbread
made by

Joe & Chrissie

Egg Nog

&

Peppermint Ice Cream

made by

Andrew & Sherri

We spent the rest of the night playing the game Taboo and going back for seconds. It was a lovely and relaxing holiday and we are looking forward to doing it all over again next year.

Reading

Just finished reading this book and it was pretty entertaining. She's like a neurotic Chelsea Handler. Now I am going to have to go on a Laurie Notaro binge and read all of her other books.

Next up is Room, our newest book club pick.

Ireland

Our European adventure began in Dublin. We stayed in downtown Dublin in the Temple Bar area. The Arlington Hotel

Our hotel had a pub attached to it and every night they had free shows with Irish bands and Irish dancers. We'd come back after a day of sight-seeing and enjoy a pint of Carlsberg or Matt's new favorite Smithwicks (the w is silent, which we were informed by a bartender after 4 days of misspronouncing it) and watch whatever show was going on that night.

Our hotel was right down the street from Christ Church Cathedral. The church was comissioned by Richard de Clare, aka Strongbow, in 1172 and remodeled in the 1870's.

Under the church is a crypt where they have tombs and other artifacts collected over the years. Jenaya's favorite thing in the crypt was the mummifed cat and rat that were found in an organ pipe in the 1860's

St. Patrick's Cathedral was a 10 minute walk from Christ Church. It is Ireland's largest church and is built on the site of a sacred well where it is said that St. Patrick baptized converts around 450 AD.

St. Patrick's Collects donations for the church's organ in a Guinness keg.

We went on a tour through the Wicklow Gap, a low spot between the mountains of South East Ireland and then to Glendalough, "the valley of two lakes."

The main sight in Glendalough is the monastic village ruins. The buildings date back from the 8th to 12th centuries and were built near the Lower lake.

Entrance to the monastic village

In the graveyard

Graveyard and mountain view

Ruins of St. Kevin's Cross

Small Chapel known at St. Kevin's Kitchen because the belfry resembles a chimney

Upper Lake surrounded by mountains

View of the Irish coast from the bus

One night we met up with Jenaya's friend Emily who lives in Dublin with her fiance Donald. We met at the Brazenhead, Dublin's oldest pub, then went to the Palace Bar, a small traditional style pub, and finished the night at the Bank, a modern pub built inside of an old bank. We were starving at the end of the night so Emily pointed us in the direction of Abrakababra, Ireland's equivalent to Jack in the Box.

So delicious!

The Temple Bar in Temple Bar

On our second tour we went to Blarney Castle. Until we got there, we had no idea that the Blarney stone was not a giant rock on the ground. It is actually attached to the top of the Blarney castle.

The tallest stone on the left is the Blarney Stone We also didn't realize that you had to dangle upside down over a giant hole with a Blarney Carney holding on to you so you don't plummet head first into the ground.

See how far down that park bench is? I was so nervous when Matt dangled down to kiss the stone I almost forgot to take a picture.

Oops!

The view from the top of Blarney Castle

Interior view of the castle

At the top of the castle

Farmer's Market in the castle parking lot

Another highlight of this tour was a quick stop in Cobh, pronounced "cove," which was the last port of call for the Titanic.

Titanic Bar There were also plenty of sights to see in Dublin right near our hotel. Grafton street, which runs from Trinity College up to St. Stephen's Green, is the main shopping area in Dublin. We did a little bit of shopping and a lot of eating in this area.

Entrance to St. Stephen's Green

Flower stands on the side streets of Grafton Street

The beginning of our European cheese obsession.

We had a wonderful 5 days in Ireland. We loved walking around in the misty rain and warming up with tea and pints inside of pubs every evening. It was a great way to start our trip.