ho ho ho & ha ha ha

It's not Sunday but the Day After Christmas. (Or Recovery Day.) Just as Friday wasn't Friday but The Day Before Christmas. Is it this way for you too? The days leading up to Christmas lose their day-ness and instead become a lead-up to The Big Day. Tomorrow will be just a little bit Monday, Tuesday more Tuesday than not, and by Wednesday things should be back to normal, according to the Romans and their planetary naming system.

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with four delightful men: my husband, two sons and step-son, each one of them sharp as a tack with wit that cannot be contained and a sense of humor that left me last night completely spent of laughter, exhausted by So Much Fun.

My two boys and I compete every year for the goofiest wrap job, and I was once again left in the dust by my eldest, who made use of cast-offs from his restaurant job, packaging his brother's gift (a bottle of fancy tequila) in an empty plastic gallon salad dressing container, and my gift (Home, by Emma Donoghue)in a compostable take-out box. My use of mildewed vintage dictionary pages taped-together to make large sheets of paper just didn't cut it. Even when I tied the package with upholstery thread and glued triangles of red ribbon to it. Alas. I've been outdone by silly sons, once again. One year I contemplated sewing together used fabric softener sheets to form a sort of wrapping-fabric. (Recycled!) This year I thought about gluing large clumps of dryer lint to a package. But didn't. I really must plan this in advance next year.

My morning today was spent perusing the 800+ recipes in this book, a gift from Paul:


For not being a cook, my husband sure knows how to pick out cookbooks: he hit a home run outa the park with this one. The recipes, oddly, are arranged by major ingredient rather than category, which, after two hours with my head in these pages, has me convinced is the way to go. There's savory beside sweet, but if you find yourself with a bushel of overgrown zucchini, say, you need only flip to page 467 to find Fried Zucchini Matchsticks, Every Year Zucchini Bread and Savory Zucchini Pie.

Here are some of the chapters, with a teaser recipe:
Grits (Hot Tomato Grits)
Okra (Oven Okra Etouffee)
Bacon (Kentucky Baby Hot Browns)
Gravy (Sawmill Gravy)
Coca Cola (Cherry Coke BBQ Sauce)
Watermelon (Watermelon and Purple Onion Salad)

I'm an obsessive reader of cookbooks and online recipe sites, and it is with pure pleasure to discover an entire book of new cooking adventures.

And now it's on to that recovery I mentioned earlier. Perhaps a nap.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.