Festive Foods Friday Five

FESTIVE FOODS FRIDAY FIVE

From the RevGalBlogPals: Well friends, we've covered advent, music, and movies/TV--but we here at F5 HQ would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that quintessential holiday topic... fooooooooood.

1. Favorite cookie/candy/baked good without which, it's just not Christmas.

• Chocolate Sugar Bombs as named by my family for the way I make the traditional "Russian Tea Cakes" (with a Hershey's kiss in the middle)! (Recipe in next post!)
  
• BUCKEYES candies - homemade - yummy - chocolate and peanut butter. YUM!

2. Do you do a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, both, or neither? (Optional: with whom will you gather around the table this year?) I will be curious to read the RGBP take on this one. WHO has time for a big dinner on Christmas Eve? Usually it's a fast meal, more of a "large snack" to tide us over until the after-service drop-in Christmas party at someone's home! Dinner is usually mid-day-ish on Christmas Day. Ham and other things which can bake on a timer in the oven, plus the afore-mentioned cookies! This year we dine with BBS's mom and our kids. Later in the week we will spend time with my family.

3. Evaluate one or more of the holiday beverage trifecta: hot chocolate, wassail, egg nog.

• Hot chocolate: What's not to like! YUM!
  
• Wassail: Not bad (if you've never had it, one could say it compares to the gluwein at the German Christkindlesmarkts during Advent, except gluwein is usually served hot.
• Egnogg: Yummy in coffee. I have been good and only bought the "low fat" this year (which is only 1,000 calories per sip instead of 5,000.) If brandy falls in your eggnog, so much the better!

4. Candy canes: do you like all the new-fangled flavors or are you a peppermint purist?
I am apparently living a sheltered life! Candy canes come in other flavors? EW.

5. Have you ever actually had figgy pudding? And is it really so good that people will refuse to leave until they are served it?
Yes I have and no it is not that good. I think they just needed another verse to drink more wassail.

Edited to add: Well, I am APPALLED with myself that I forgot to include a question about the crown prince of holiday foods--the fruitcake. Feel free to add your thoughts on this most polarizing holiday confection.

Ah, the fruitcake. I hear that people actually eat them from the box. My family's recipe is to open the tin, take out the fruitcake, wrap it in cheesecloth, pour a bottle of brandy over it (it absorbs it quickly), put back in the tin and stick it in the freezer until next year. Then it was sliced and passed around and generally ignored on the plate (except for surreptitious snorts of the brandy fumes...) We usually end up with Claxton Fruitcakes and they are folks who take their fruitcakes seriously... but NOT as seriously as the folks at "The Society for Protection and Preservation of Fruitcakes." (I mean, they must be either serious or seriously crazy! They bought their own domain name????)

God's peace and blessed Christmas to all of you -
From our cookie-saturated home to yours...

Deb