Tuesday, 1/4

Now I actually realize how much work went into all those holiday celebrations.

First of all, happy 2022!  Hope your New Years weekend went well.  Mine did; aside from spending too much time working on “Cops & Robbers” and conducting an experiment on myself (the results of which I’ll talk about tomorrow) I spent a LOT of time cooking and baking.

And that’s how I came to appreciate everything my mom & grandmother did over all those years of family celebrations.

Between Christmas and Sunday I spent hours making everything from Greek food to desserts to herb-crusted pork roasts to scones to Gnocchi to homemade cranberry sauce to Kaiserschmarnn and an old family tradition called Broken Glass.  Some of that was just for Loraine and me, while some of it was shared with siblings and nieces and nephews.  But by Sunday morning, after I had whipped up the last of the dishes (the  Kaiserschmarrn) I sat back and realized just how much work I had put in the past few days.

And thought of how much work my mom & grandmother (and, I’m sure, yours, too) had put in during those years of big family celebrations.

I mean, if I spent hours working on a dish for just the two of us, how much work did they have to put in feeding an entire extended family?  As a kid, you don’t think of things like that. As an adult, you come to appreciate just how hard they worked to make everything festive and just right for everyone.

So while it may be too late to tell my grandmother, it’s not too late to tell my mom “thank you”.  It may have taken me a few decades to figure it out, but thanks for putting in all that work during all those holidays.  I really appreciate it.

Maybe one of these years I’ll even figure out how you did it all!

            *****

Speaking of some of the food, here’s just a sample (with apologies for taking them with a phone camera).

The Kaiserschmarrn with the homemade cranberry sauce (and Nutella, because how you can not have it with Nutella?)--

And the Broken Glass, which is a New Year’s Eve tradition that’s been in the family for decades (and one that my siblings await all year).  It’s a two day project that starts with making three kinds of Jell-O and ends up with pineapple juice, Dream Whip, and enough butter to clog the arteries of everyone in Marquette.

But it's really, really good–

            ****

Back to reality now, and tomorrow, as I promised, the story of how I experimented on myself over the course of almost a week.

(jim@wmqt.com)