A Merry Married Christmas

My Dad's birthday is December 23rd. This year he turned 52 and we celebrated it by going out for pizza with a bunch of his friends. He had a pretty big turn out - almost 20 people. That's more than I can get to come to my bday parties! They even brought him 2 cakes and presents (mostly vodka for jello shots.) Joey and I got him Jenga. We thought maybe it would help him embrace his youth...

CHRISTMAS EVE

This year we decided to host Christmas at our apartment. My mom and brother Kenny came over to spend the night. I made delicious cheese and chocolate fondue for dinner. I am thinking of making it a yearly tradition. Here is a picture of the cheese spread. I served bread pieces, turkey sausage, roasted mushrooms, blanched broccoli, and sliced apples, accompanied by a romaine and spinach salad. For the dark chocolate fondue we had strawberries, bananas, pretzels, apples, and ladyfingers. Mmmmmm!

After dinner we played Scattergories and Apples to Apples. It was a lot of fun. We were up playing past 1am. Late night! In the morning we made a nice breakfast and Joey and I gave my family a couple gifts. For my mom, instead of really doing presents this year, we decided to take her on a trip to Los Angeles to see my brother Jason. She hasn't been on a vacation in years and we knew she's been dying to go see my brother. To break the news, I photoshopped a picture of us in front of the Hollywood sign and then cut it up like a puzzle. She was so surprised. Here are some pictures of her trying to figure it out.

Then it was back to cooking! I love cooking on holidays. I made potatoes au gratin, green beans, sweet potato casserole, and a giant ham (do I talk about food too much? probably not.) I made everything from scratch and it turned out pretty well.

All in all, a very successful first Christmas!

HOW MANY GT GRADS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A POT OF COFFEE???

Ok, so this isn't really a story or anything but Joey and I spent a good 15 minutes this morning trying to calculate how to make a pot of coffee. I got some delicious Dunkin Donuts coffee for Christmas so I wanted to make it JUST right. The bag said 1 1/2 tablespoons of coffee for each 6 oz of water. So we looked at the coffee pot and it turns out 1 "cup" on the pot is actually roughly 4.5 oz of water (how does THAT make sense?!!??). Which means one of our coffee mugs is about 3.5 "cups" in the coffee pot...or something like that. So 10 min, some measuring, and a little algebra later we finally figured out the ratio to make good coffee. Nothing like some math in the morning to get your day started...I blame the coffee industry for this one.

So we are all caught up. I hope everyone had a great holiday! Look for my next post, hopefully about a fantastic new years eve!