Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

My wife is working Christmas and New Years, so I'm making dinner at the observatory. Our friend Dave is driving down from Colorado tomorrow and staying until after New Years, so we're going to get a lot of gaming in which will be quite awesome. There's some advanced scenarios for Flash Point: Fire Rescue that I've been wanting to play that I hopeexpect we'll get to.

Anyway, on to the menu!

The main dish is Alton Brown's City Ham. This is a bit of a preparation: you take a ham, cut a shallow (about a quarter inch deep) diamond pattern in it, do a short time bake to loosen the fat, then trim the fat off. Dry it, paint it with brown mustard. Cover it with packed dark brown sugar. Spritz it with bourbon, then pack it with powdered ginger snap cookies. Bake until done, rest it for half an hour, cut and serve. Quite yummy, in fact I bought a special pump just for spritzing the bourbon. Takes about six hours between the two bakes and all the work, so it's not a quick dish.

First side dish: glazed carrots. Another Alton dish, this one is unique as it uses ginger ale as its main cooking liquid. Also contains a bit of brown sugar and a small amount of chili powder. VERY good, I made it for Thanksgiving this year and it will definitely be a regular at my table.

Second and final dish for me: German potato salad. This particular one is an Anne Burrel recipe, I've made it several times and it is very nice.

All three recipes are available on FoodNetwork.com. And the ham bone will become a lentil soup at some point in January most likely. I had originally planned on doing a turducken or a quaduckant, but it turns out we'll only have five people, so I'm doing a lot more work. Oh, well.


New Year's will be a taco bar with recipes from America's Test Kitchen.

Should be cool, I'm looking forward to it. I still think the Japanese version is better, though the American version may not be as entertaining for me, it's still decent.