What I Made for Dinner: December 28 & 30, 2009

Family spaghetti sauce with meatballs, Italian sausages, and lamb; eggplant parmesan with leftover sauce.

I love the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.  Love it like no other time of year.  I am on winter recess.  Chuck has been taking some time off.  Chuck's brother, Chris, has been visiting, which is always fun.  So we're all home, and it's been mostly too cold and icy to really go anywhere, and really, where would we go if we could?

Spaghetti sauce is perfect for this kind of week.  It takes four hours to make it, for one thing.  But what a payoff!  Besides a nice dinner Monday night with Chris joining us, we have a whole dinner of leftovers saved in the freezer for some time in February when I'm too swamped with grading to cook.  And we still had enough leftover sauce for tonight's luscious, hearty eggplant parmesan.

In non-food related homebound activities, I've been using this week to organize the house and potty-train Eli.  Other people use winter break to write important scholarly articles.  Me, I cleaned out the pantry, arranged my sweaters by color, and set up a dedicated Lego space, all while taking frequent breaks for either potty-visiting or carpet-cleaning.  A pretty productive vacation, if you ask me.

I won't be cooking for the rest of 2009:  Tomorrow night we plan to get takeaway from an excellent local restaurant.  In another lifetime, say maybe ten years ago, we would have dressed up and gone to the excellent local restaurant, and drank and danced and stayed late into the night.  Tomorrow, we'll put the kids to bed and enjoy a late dinner, delicious and cooked by someone else, and then a glass of port, and we'll probably be asleep when 2010 rolls in. 

Here's to happiness, health, peace, and prosperity--and lots of good dinners--in the new year.