Last night, after the sun dropped away leaving our windows blackened (at approximately 3:34 pm) and the quiet of a Sunday night settled in over us, I hung up my apron on the back of the pantry door after the last of these lemon poppy seed shortbread rounds were packaged up and stashed away.  The apron was a birthday gift from my mom, white and crisp and even a little professional looking, and it has gotten quite a lot of use between my birthday in late November and last night.

True story.  On the way into work yesterday morning, my high heels clicking against the sidewalk and my scarf wound right up under my chin and my shoulders hunched against the chill, my mind wandered to the two clementines I had tucked into my bag before I left home.  Small, orange, juicy and perfect.  They were my happy place—sad as that might be.

And this, friends, is what they call a tease.  That pistachio brittle you see there—lightly salted and very nearly burnt—is absolutely, completely, through-and-through delicious.  And I made it and I’ve got the recipe for you.  I do.

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After all that moping last week about my trouble getting into the holiday spirit, I discovered that the solution is actually incredibly easy.  And it’s this: pour yourself a hot toddy.  I also recommend throwing on some holiday music and adorning your home with metallic balls and fronds of pine and twinkling lights.  But if you’ve tried these things to no avail—or if you’re just short on time, the toddy will suffice, I think.  So, if you find yourself in the same boat as I was in last week, hop to it.  It’s time to toddy.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ve concluded that the hot toddy is one of the most underappreciated fixtures on the holiday scene.  Cookies take the spotlight, fruitcake gets all the fuss, and cooks can’t see past the Christmas dinner centerpiece, be it roasted goose, a crown roast, or rosy slices of prime rib.  Meanwhile, the hot toddy slips quietly into the background.  Today, though, I plan to give it it’s holiday due.

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Imagine, if you will, a brownie gone Christmas.  Surely it’s not such a difficult task—the whole world, it seems, has gone Christmas.  The television commericals, the lobby of my building (which features, sporadically, a real live harpist strumming carols; I kid you not), my morning coffee cup, shrubbery everywhere.  So why wouldn’t the brownie, standby treat that is, want to join in by going Christmas too?

And this recipe allows the brownie to do just that.  And not by way of a dash of peppermint extract or a crushed candy cane topping—flavors, if I’m honest, that I find a bit cloying and, well, toothpastey.

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Coffee cake and I go way back.  It’s one of the first things I remember baking as a kid, which makes me realize that, when I first started out in the kitchen, I was much more the cook than the baker.  In my single-digit years, I made a mean ham sandwich (extra pickles!) and I had the “spaghetti test” (the one where you fling a cooked noodle at the nearest wall; for the life of me, I can’t remember what result one hoped for) down pat.  By the time I could drive, I had a bruschetta recipe that earned me adoring fans (family memebers all, but still.).  When I finally moved into an apartment of my own in college, my talents lay mainly on the stovetop, rather than the oven—in the sizzle of a wok (stir fry), on the shining surface of a griddle (grilled cheese; pancakes), in the bubbling water of a sauce pot (pasta).  Aside from an impromptu chocolate chip cookie bake or my mom’s annual Christmas cookie madness (with which I helped and, naturally, by “helped” I mean “sneaked bits of dough”), I just wasn’t much of a baker.

Which probably explains why the coffee cake stands out in my memory.  It’s what I baked during a seventh grade home economics (was it really called that?) class and, I suppose, it’s quite possibly the first thing I baked all on my own (or rather with the help of a couple group members, if memory serves, but I have every confidence they functioned primarily as my sous chefs).  Whatever the case, I was dazzled by that coffee cake experience—from the precise measurements to the thick batter to the final product, a puffed cake topped and bisected with a rippling layer of struesel.  I even liked the process of cleaning up the mess—returning flour canisters to the cupboards, filling a sink with sudsy soap, upturning the washed measuring cups on a kitchen towel to dry—as the cake baked.  I remember hardly anything else from home ec (I do have a vague recollection of a long row of sewing machines and a length of cloth stiched to the quarterback’s flannel (it was the 90’s, folks) shirt), but I do remember that cake.

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Well, folks: we did it!  You’ve been cheering us along—Kevin and I—as we prepared to host our first Thanksgiving, so I figured it was only fair that we gave you a glimpse of how the whole thing went down.  Kevin and I have put together a list of lessons learned—a how-to, of sorts, for first time Thanksgiving hosts.   And so, we bring you a list of five tips for first-time hosts, along with Kevin’s and my take on each tip.

Tip # 1: Keep in Mind that Giblets are a Two-Person Job.

Kevin: When I heard that we were getting a special all-natural heritage bird I was obviously all for it.  Natural, local, let’s do it.  When I heard the price I figured this bird was all-inclusive, whatever that meant.  We picked it up at the Evanston Farmer’s Market and were a bit surprised when we were given a rock hard frozen 10 pound mass.  Wait a second.  We could have gotten a frozen butterball for $3.99.  Anyway, we got over that initial disappointment and thawed the bird and it was finally time to clean it.  Now, Kristin is pretty self-sufficient in the kitchen.  I usually am only allowed near the dishes and the finished goods, which is just fine by me.  But I was finally called into duty, because this heritage bird was indeed all-inclusive.  And by all-inclusive I mean heart, kidneys, livers (how many livers does a turkey have? 6?), neckbone, etc.  About 2 hours later it was all completely gutted and snipped, including a final surprise: the gobbler, saggy and heritage-d.

Kristin: You need one person (Kevin) to slip the bird out of its packaging, peer inside the cavity and report his findings to the other person (Kristin).  You need one person (Kevin) to gingerly pull out each of the giblets, which in our case were not conveniently located in a tidy bag but instead floating free inside the turkey’s cavity; meanwhile the other person (Kristin) holds open a giant garbage bag, providing moral support as the giblet-remover (again, this is Kevin) drops one organ after another into the bag.  In our case, the giblet remover (I’m pretty sure you’ve got this by now: Kevin) did his best to identify the parts as they dropped into the bag, each landing with a heavier thud than the last.  Shamefully, reader, our giblets then went directly into the dumpster out back in the alley (thanks to Kevin) and a calming glass of wine was poured (thanks to Kristin).  I know, I know that the giblets could have made their way into various Thanksgiving dishes.  Maybe by the time we host a second time, we’ll be brave enough to actually use the giblets.  And maybe we’ll figure out how to make their removal a one-person (Kevin) job.

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We made it!  Our Thanksgiving went off without a hitch, but more on that next time (hint: we’ve got another joint post, along the lines of this one, up our sleeves, so stay tuned!).  For now, though, we’ve got more pressing matters to deal with.  Leftovers.  It’s not all that glamorous a topic, I’m aware, but we’ve all got them.  And I’ve got a lot of them, each little tupperware container making me feel guiltier than the next every single time I open the fridge.  So, I put an end to it today.

I declared it the day of the leftovers and, if I do say so myself, it was quite a success.  First, the turkey carcass went into my biggest stock pot, along with some carrots and onions and such; several softly bubbling, very aromatic hours later, I had myself a mind-boggling amount of turkey stock.  Much of the stock went into a Wild Rice-Turkey Soup later in the afternoon, but some of it also served as the base of the filling for these pot pies, which were the centerpiece of our  Sunday night dinner.

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Today has been full of surprises.   I got home from work today (at 4:00! working from home tomorrow! five days away from the office! but, hey, who’s counting?!) and found a big cardboard box, criss-crossed with packing tape, waiting just inside the front door of our building.   My eyebrows, I’m sure, betrayed my confusion—first arching, then furrowing.  The return address revealed its sender (my grandparents), but that only stumped me more.  It’s my birthday on Friday, but my grandparents sent a gift a couple weeks ago (ever prepared).  After huffing-and-puffing my way up the four flights of stairs mulling over the box’s contents, I finally made it into our apartment, sliced through the tape and found big bags of my grandma’s caramel corn and my grandpa’s party mix (homemade Chex mix), both of which are holiday harbingers if ever my family had any.  My grandparents, it seems, figured that if I wouldn’t be joining them in Minnesota this Thursday, they’d send a little bit of our traditional Thanksgiving to me here in Chicago.

The package promptly delivered a spring to my step and had me practically sprinting into the kitchen to do the Thanksgiving baking and cooking I had on the agenda for the evening.  Elbow deep in flour, the oven throbbing with heat and a couple flames dancing on the range, I began cracking eggs for the chocolate pudding that will fill our Thanksgiving chocolate cream pie.  Two egg yolks in, I reached for a third egg, gave it a quick rap on the countertop and split it in half.  Inside the shell were two perfect yellow orbs: twin yolks!  I breathlessly showed the treasure(s) to Kevin, tweeted about the incident and then got back to the pie at hand.

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