Christmas Eve

I have a rule that you don't sleep alone on Christmas Eve.  So steadfast am I in this rule that I contemplated cuddling with the couple downstairs on Christmas Eve.  Fortunately for them and their personal space, my sister decided to visit for the weekend.  This led to several very fun adventures and a decent amount of tasty cooking as well.  Pictures are intermittent because I forgot to take them several times.  But rest assured, I do have some nice photos to share.

Well, nice being a relative term and all.  This is a picture of me in my Christmas dress.  Also worn at Thanksgiving, for the record.  I'm sporting plaid Betula sandals (i.e. Birkenstocks) with red and green striped socks. lol.  My Christmas costume.  :)

I'll go ahead and apologize now for the poor photo quality on these photos.  I took a lot of these on my cell phone in order to upload them to facebook as I went along.

On Christmas Eve morning I made homemade breakfast sandwiches with sweet potato fries, apple butter, and fresh fruit.  The breakfast sandwiches were fresh-ish onion bagels that I got on clearance at Meijer the night before.  I toasted them in the oven and topped them with leftover ham that I made for a work lunch party, scrambled egg, and cheddar cheese slices.  My sister recommended apple butter as a dip for the sweet potato fries and it really took this breakfast to the next level.

On the left there you can see the "Buddha Hand" that I bought on a whim at Meijer.  Its some sort of lemon like fruit that is all sorts of disfigured.  It looked really awesome.  Unfortunately I used it to garnish a cookie tray at a party the next day and it was left behind.

After our nourishment, my sister and I made a trip over to Country Fresh on Vine St. to pick up some fresh produce.  We may or may not have gotten side tracked and purchased a case of wine.

We took a little more then half the case of wine to various events over the course of the weekend.  I kept the rest here...we do a lot of entertaining and I'm sure it'll be consumed eventually.

Whats that?  Salad, you say?  You can hardly see the lettuce in that cart!  My sister made the salad this time around and I was graced with the leftovers.  mmm.

We forgot to bring salad dressing and my grandmother doesn't believe in that pre-bottled crap that is full of preservatives.  So she helped us out and made some homemade italian dressing while I scrambled to take photographs for the blog.

We'll finish up this blog post with two pictures illustrating the worldly view of this side of my family.  My dad really wanted to try out my ham recipe, so I brought a ham over.  Here is a picture of the ham being carved.

One of my grandmother's good friends is Indian and she enjoys cooking.  My grandmother has learned some fantastic recipes and we love it when she makes them.  For Christmas, she made a crowd pleaser-Chicken Biryani.  

She was kind enough to share a copy of the recipe with me, and I will post it one of these days...hopefully with instructional how-to photos.

This is all for now.  Stay tuned for photos of the Christmas Morning Afternoon breakfast that I made.  Homemade Cinnamon Rolls!  From scratch!