Christmas thoughts about Christmas Eve...

All in all, yesterday was an exhausting day.

The assignment due yesterday was lighter, in terms of words, than that of the day before, but still ended up in the more-than-5000 words category. Nonetheless, I got through it and sent it off, whereupon Natalie and I went to the bank and then to a number of other places including the Shanghai Restaurant, where Natalie touched base with Kiu, who runs the place with her husband Kevin (who is in California with the kids, doubtless visiting relatives, leaving Kiu to hold the fort—you don't just up and close a restaurant for a couple of weeks).

Upon returning home, we undertook the making of пилмени from scratch, those marvelous ravioli-like morsels that are traditional at any time of year. I started out by misreading the recipe for the dough, adding four eggs instead of just the yolks, which probably accounted for why the dough was so runny, requiring the addition of a lot more flour.

Eventually, though, we got into the groove and turned out more than 100 little dumplings before calling it a night. I tried making "egg noodles" with some of the remaining dough, and though the end result seemed edible, Galina prevailed upon me not to eat it, saying "it's nothing but dough" (to which I was thinking, "yeah, but isn't that the definition of a noodle?").

The kids (and grandkids) will be coming over in a couple of hours to open presents, so I'm going to see if I can't make a galette between now and than.

Greetings of the day to all!

Cheers...

A very nice morning...

For some reason, I started thinking of the half-cup measure as a quarter-cup measure, and so, started with 2-1/2 cups of flour in the galette recipe instead of 1-3/4 cups.

I only realized this when the butter and water I added didn't seem to be forming dough the way it occurred the previous two times I had tried the recipe, at which point I scaled up the amounts of butter and water (by 10/7), and the dough started to take shape, even if it was nearly half as much again as I needed.

So, I decided to make two galettes, one with red and black raspberries, and the other with strawberries.

We started cooking once the kids arrived and had a marvelous scrambled-egg-and-mushroom-and-onion breakfast with mimosas, followed by the raspberry galette with coffee. Then we sat down to the serious business of opening presents and taking photos.

I'll probably post some later, but right now, I need to take a nap!

Cheers...

Wonder if this counts as a sort of "mise en abîme"?

Cheers...

Strawberry galette...

The raspberry one is history. This one is for dinner tomorrow: