A Joyous Season with a Guest Post

Over the last year,  I 've learned that blogging is like music and you need to play many tunes and several instruments in harmony and coordination to produce music that sounds perfect. As we draw towards the end of another successful year of cooking, I am introducing a new tune ---a guest post from both my daughters N and V.

On Christmas day, my husband R and I had the pleasant experience of being served this wonderful meal made from scratch by our children!  We appreciate the simple menu of pimento cheese finger sandwiches, Cioppino, crusty garlic bread, garden salad and a multitude of good wines ending with a Chocolate Souffle.  The sizzling hot seafood soup and sandwiches were so decadent that it made all the Christmas gifts look faded and unimportant. All the time I was saying to myself maybe I can sitback and relax for the rest of the years!! Is this my big break from the kitchen? Do you think they will let me get away with no more cooking at Christmas? Perhaps I can get out of cooking big dinners for the Holidays next year?

Anyway, today's theme is about the making of this meal in their own words, so with tremendous pride and joy I introduce N and V ............

"Hi this is a guest post written by V and N. We've been reading our mom's food blog and are so happy that she's taken this new endeavor on. For Christmas this year, we decided to make dinner for our parents. Usually our mom takes on the task of the Christmas meal. Last year, N helped out our mom, but this year we both decided to take dinner into our own hands. V came up with the idea of Ciopinno and N decided to make the crusty bread and salad. After watching Food Network, V had a craving for pimento "sammies".

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sunny-anderson/easy-pimento-cheese-recipe/index.html

Mini sandwiches made with homemade pimento cheese. Pimento cheese is quite commonly seen in grocery stores in the south, but we decided to make our own, as starters for our Christmas dinner! N bought the ingredients for the pimento sammies while V went on a trek to acquire the many complicated ingredients for the Ciopinno.

The local asian market proved to be the best place to get fresh seafood. We also decided to get the mixers to make some cocktails with Pisco and Vodka. The drinking began with the preparation of the Giada Cioppino, which made cooking the dish a whole lot more fun :) There was a lot of youtubing involved with figuring out how to clean all the seafood...deveining the shrimp, "debearding" a mussel. We were scared what improper "debearding" would cause for consumption of the mussels but we pressed forward. The clams and fish were the easiest to deal with. Clams merely require a rigorous scrubbing and cleaning, and since cod is boneless we just chopped up the filets and put them into the simmering cioppino broth. After much cleaning, chopping and simmering....a delicious concoction was created. Here's what it looked like...............

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/cioppino-recipe/index.html"


The Chocolate Souffle is a Bailey's version of the Godiva Chocolate Souffle recipe which I have changed a bit to make it more chocolatey...the original recipe can be found here
http://www.godiva.com/recipes/recipe.aspx?id=576

 It is almost the last day of this month and 2011, I bid you good bye until next year, and Thank You for a wonderful dinner N and V!!