Saturday, January 22, 2011

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.

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