New Year's Eve

So what's everyone doing to ring in the new year? I'll be headed off to the same place up in the Sierra Foothills, with the same group of friends with whom we've done this for the last 17 years. (My wife's in the midst of a nasty cold, so she'll be staying home this time.) Our theme this year is "16 going on 17", which isn't much to work with unless you bring in the Sound of Music connection, which then leads to German and Austrian food. I'm making Konigsberger Klopse, which are meatballs made with several types of meat (veal, beef, and turkey in my case). They include onions, anchovy paste, and a little nutmeg and clove. They're poached in beef (or chicken or veal) broth flavored with allspice, peppercorns, and bay leaves. After they're poached, the broth is reduced and cream and egg yolks are added for thickening. I'll bring a non-dry riesling to go with.

Should be fun to see what everyone else comes up with.

Sorry, Mike

Nothing special for us, and we were in bed asleep before midnight..

[Robin Garr]

We had friends over for a nice New Year's Eve brunch with an interesting mass baked-egg dish that I'll post later on, and decent fizzy prosecco at midday. A quiet evening at home, toast on London time, and so to bed.

Hors d'oeuvres provided by the upstairs neighbor, then a seafood spread at my house (clams, oysters, shrimp, crab cake). Inexpensive bubbles and riesling with the food, high-octane egg nog around midnight.

Did no cooking myself because of late travel but would put a plug in for Koenigsberger Klops. Met up with them while a student at the University of Chicago and then again at Karl Ratzsch's restaurant in Milwaukee. Betty Fussell, in her I Hear America Cooking cookbook claims to have Ratzsch's original recipe. I made them this past year for a party or 40. Excellent, delicate flavor. I think I also served her wild rice with blueberries and morels. It appeared in the same chapter Trappers and Milkers which served as a theme for the party - Trappers and Milkers, Foods of the Upper Midwest. Emmi Roth Kase aged Grand Surchiox which won the 2016 International Cheese contest was one of the featured cheeses at the party.
A nice 2016 memory !

I made boeuf bourguignon for New Year's Eve.

-Paul W.

Carl was recovering from a cold and I was just catching his. I managed to push my way through our traditional New Year's dinner preparation, but not without stops and starts and off-timing on everything. Two annoying "friends" dropped in just as I was pulling the rib roast off the grill. I asked where they were headed all dressed up and pretty. They said, "just making our rounds". We tried to entertain them for about 30 minutes, but made no special effort between Carl's hacking and sneezing and my stepping on the food items I seemed to keep dropping. Then the wife saddled up to me and said, "things always look and smell so good in here - do you mind if we invite ourselves to dinner?" Without thinking, I said, sure - why not (in that 'nothing else could possibly go wrong' tone). Within 5 minutes she and her husband said, "we're going to go home and change clothes, we'll see you in about 30 minutes, after we get comfortable". They wanted to know if I wanted them to pick up anything for me on their way back over? Really?! You have invited yourself to dinner and you need to ask if you should bring anything??!!
I was not feeling good, and definitely not feeling in the mood for company -- especially this company. About 5 years ago we invited them to New Year's day dinner, which I prepare every year for my family and on occasion I invite a few friends. We haven't invited them since (they have no sense of proportion), but every New Year's day they manage to make their rounds and find themselves at our dinner table on their last stop. This year it annoyed me that the woman asked to invite themselves to our table - yet again. Who the hell does that?! The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got, until I finally got angry at the impertinence and assumption of it all. I got on the phone and rescinded the invitation telling them they could come by the next day and get a bowl of gumbo if there was any left.
I was mad at myself for even accepting their behavior the past few years. It occurs to me that they always manage to wrangle a meal out of us every time they are here. They always arrive empty-handed, and they never invite us to their home for dinner or a meal out. Sometimes I wonder why we ever invited some people into our lives. The next day they did not call to see how we were feeling nor come by for a bowl of gumbo. I hope never to see them again. If not, that would be the start to a great New Year. If they do come back by, I'm going to go there with them. I need to start 2017 off in a better place! GEESH!
DINNER:
Chitterlings
Prime Rib Roast (5 bones)
Black eyed peas
Collard greens with ham hocks
Dirty Rice
Yams with apples and Calvados
Seafood Gumbo
white rice
corn bread
peach cobbler
lemon pound cake

[Jenise]

What a great menu--I'm so sorry you were both feeling so bad. Not easy to cook in that condition, and I can relate to your general sense of irritation. But those people!! And this part really stood out to me: "They always arrive empty-handed, and they never invite us to their home for dinner or a meal out." You mentioned that they earlier asked if they could pick up anything on their way back: I am presuming that was a perfunctory question to which the answer was presumed to be a 'no' before it was even asked and which they then used to excuse themselves out of contributing anything at all by way of appreciation for your hospitality, even a bottle of wine. I have no requirement for hostess gifts and never expect them, but at the same time I can't understand people who feel comfortable showing up for a meal empty-handed. And God made wine so that we don't have to! It's so easy!

Used to know a couple like that. If we ever ran into them they always wanted to know what was for dinner, as if trying to decide if that was a meal they wanted to invite themselves to. We quit inviting them. And then one day they called and invited us out to breakfast (not my choice of meals, but at least it was an invitation and we honored it.) And guess what? Separate checks. BOOM.

Wow, Jo Ann. As much as I would salivate over the smells that must have been coming out of your kitchen, I would never presume to invite myself for supper. Being on the other side of it, I'd probably react as you did. Let it go the first couple of times until I got mad enough about it to tell them to forget it.

Speaking of colds, both my wife and I were affected for NYE. She was completely down and did not make the trip up to the foothills for supper. I was a little better off, so I drove up with my Koenigesberger Klopse and had a great meal with everyone. For the first time in 16 years, though, I didn't spend the night. I left around 10:30 and got home a little before 11:30,which allowed me to see what's been going on in our neighborhood the last couple of years. The guy next door to us is both a D.A. and a professional D.J., and he put tarps up to enclose their outdoor patio. Within the patio, he had his sound system with a TV and a light show. It was pretty much a full-on club in his backyard. The rest of the neighbors were in there drinking and dancing, and it was a hell of a scene. Quite a lot of fun, so I joined them at midnight for the ball drop and a toast before crawling into bed shortly thereafter. It was pretty noisy, but between my cold and the food and drink from the evening,it didn't bother me.

Sorry to hear about your colds, Jo Ann, but what a great spread! (And good for you for putting moochers in their place.)

The Francophile and I are getting staid and boring in our old age. We cooked dinner, watched a movie on tv, drank a bottle of white wine whilst doing those things, and then went to bed well before midnight. I didn't even wake up at midnight this year - there can't have been any significant fireworks displays nearby this time. They say what you do at new year sets a pattern for what you do throughout the coming year. Maybe we're going to have a very relaxed year.

New Year's found us in the town of Mérida, in the Yucatán. Being city of two million, there are lots of NYE parties with heft admission charges. The traditional midnight food is a dozen grapes and a taco of "cochinta pibil". That's pork seasoned with achiote, wrapped in banana leaves (as are the tamales, incidentally), and baked in an underground oven called a "pib" in the Mayan language. It's topped with pickled red onion and then you squeeze a bitter (Saville) orange over it. I can't overstate how good the food was. True, it's rich and very light on vegetables, especially when you remove salad which is difficult to sanitize even with colloidal silver or bleach. But the worries I had about spending two weeks eating "Mexican food" went out the window once I realized the sheer variety of dishes that span Mexican and Maya and colonial influences, not to mention the excellent Italian and German (!) we had. Dessert was a "marquesita", a crepe that is traditionally filled with Edam cheese from the Netherlands, known as "queso de bola" ("ball cheese") but now can be had with Nutella and most of the toppings one associates with the French variety. Also hard to argue with the prices, we went to some of the nicest restaurants in town and never managed to spend more than US$70 including tip. The whole peninsula was great, as long as you can tolerate garbage in the streets and many run-down buildings.

New Year's found us in the town of Mérida, in the Yucatán...The whole peninsula was great, as long as you can tolerate garbage in the streets and many run-down buildings.

Nice report. I have very fond memories of a few weeks spent around the Yucatan way back in 2000. Not eating meat was an issue, but there were seafood options. My strongest food memory was the glorious mangos. Bags and bags of uber-ripe mangoes, for what worked out to something like 10cents per mango. I can still feel the slippery goodness in my mind!

Thanks, Rahsaan! I have some neat food pictures that I should post. I don't know how even a pesce-vegetarian could make it long-term there. True, there are tortillas which probably don't have lard, and you might be able to get beans, but there was a lot of meat. We went in one taco place where the only things on the menu were pollo and carne asada and tortillas. That was pretty bare-bones, though, no seat on the toilet, and you flushed it by dumping a bucket of water in the bowl. I was naturally apprehensive about eating in a place like that, but we enjoyed several holes in the wall and didn't get sick over two weeks. Ironically the kid who basically ate hamburgers and marquesitas all trip did get sick, so who knows? Mexico has made enormous strides in water sanitation over just the last ten years. I remember reading that literally the only place in the country with a Western water supply at that time was Cancun, and just the hotel zone, which had its own plant. Now, apparently, most cities have effective clorination so you can brush your teeth from the tap without risk. Now, whether find it palatable is a different story altogether.

Anyway, you have my admiration for making it there while sticking to your chosen diet. I tend toward pesce-lacto unless I know something about the source of the meat, but on vacation anything goes. And yes, the mangoes. Sprinkled with chile salt. The condition of some of the produce was appalling, such as one small store that had a box where most of the produce was molding. But some was spectacular, the bananas, coconuts, guanabana, guava, etc.! I can't recommend the Mercado Municipal in Valladolid highly enough. A huge multi-vendor covered market, produce, meat, clothes, basically everything.

I don't know how even a pesce-vegetarian could make it long-term there...

Well if it's really long-term then you cook whatever you want at home!

But for travelers, yes, there are challenges. Especially because (at the time, not sure about now), restaurants were supposedly not a huge part of Mexican culture, so there were just limited options in general outside of the capital.