Merry Christmas!!

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I wanted to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you who celebrates the birth of Our Savior a very Merry Christmas!  May you stay safe, warm and healthy at this joyous time.   

While many bloggers will probably be scarce until after the New Year, yours truly will likely be blogging up a storm as my day job is on hiatus for a month.  Hope to "see" you around, but if not, that's OK too ... I'll see you in 2011.  This afternoon I'm cooking up traditional Christmas Eve fare of my husband's ethnic tradition.  Perhaps I'll have some pics to post over in the Culinary Concoctions blog.  

Thanks for reading and contributing here, it means a lot to me.

Comments

Fashiontribes Diet said…
Happy holidays to you as well & a fabulous new year. Thanks for your rockin' blog!

- Lesley
December 24, 2011 at 3:16 PM
bentleyj74 said…
Merry Christmas! Do we get to guess his ethnicity too based on regional dishes? I spent all last week baking, cooking, and hating on all holidays and projects of any kind for any reason so now I can relax and enjoy :)
December 24, 2011 at 5:13 PM
Sue said…
Merry Christmas to you too.
little error in your post should read see you in 2012.
December 24, 2011 at 7:44 PM
Mzlittlekitten said…
Merry Christmas Evelyn,we all really appreciate what you do to correct the misinformation about nutrition currently out there.Keep up the excellent work!
December 25, 2011 at 9:07 PM
Anonymous said…
Enjoy your work break, Evelyn! Thank you for all the wonderful sanity.
December 26, 2011 at 7:25 AM
CarbSane said…
Thanks everyone! It was a nice low key day. Just me, the hubs and my parents. Hubby is of Ukrainian descent so we had a traditional almost vegetarian feast (it's the only almost veggie day in my year! LOL) -- Forgive spelling kutya (whole wheat pearls with poppy seeds, honey and walnuts), osyletchi (pickled herring), 2X verenyky (aka perogies for the Polish, kraut and potato filled), 2X holobtsi (kasha and wild rice & mushroom, the latter being my personal contribution to tradition, stuffed cabbage), fish (flounder), green beans, borscht, vushky (mushroom dumplings), mushroom gravy and fruit compote. Yesterday I made pork & beef holobtsi and a pot roast to round out dinner. I was bummed because I had gotten some lamb osso bucco from Costco that looked so lovely and was looking forward to trying something new. Opened the vac sealed package to a horrible stench :(

I never liked kasha, but I apparently have a talent for making it. Even my hubby's young stud employees go ga ga over the hritchky (Ukie slang for kasha holobtsi apparently). I have a little of everything.
December 26, 2011 at 12:37 PM
Galina L. said…
Marry Christms, Evelin!
As a foody, I read with a great interest your Ukrainian menu. Wow! It was a great idea to use buckwheat in a staffed cabbage, I will try it! We cook buckwheat a lot in out family. Even my son's girlfriend developed taste for it.
We were invited to celebrate with a Ukrainian family. I brought with me my most elaborate dish - staffed duck and a cheese cake . In order to make cheese cake more Ukrainian, I used poppy-seeds in the crust.
December 26, 2011 at 3:22 PM
Anonymous said…
If you have time, please post some recipes in your Culinary Concoctions blog - doesn't have to be low carb!
Happy New Year!
December 26, 2011 at 8:26 PM
bentleyj74 said…
That sounds like a ton of clean up! I vote every year that next year Christmas at my house is celebrated with [take out] pizza [on paper plates] and a pool party but I never can seem to get any takers.
December 27, 2011 at 9:34 AM
CarbSane said…
Yeppers! I admit, I don't make the verenyky. A friend of the hubs owns a miasarnia (meat store) where they sell them. I would rather buy a couple of dozen and be done with them because I could get in trouble with those things (with fried onions and sour cream, danger Will Robinson!). I do need to repack them before freezing though, they fell apart totally this year. So I fished everything out and fried it up in a pan. LOL.

But the holobtsi are definitely mess intensive. So I try to make as many as I can once. (Tip: Get a cheapo table cloth from the $1 store. Everything gets wrapped and tossed!) They freeze well so Mom gets all left overs. The meat ones are supposed to be eaten with sour cream and ketchup. Yep!
December 27, 2011 at 10:31 AM
CarbSane said…
@euler ... will do!
December 27, 2011 at 10:58 AM
Galina L. said…
My mom was raiser in Ukraine. The type of the varenyky she is most fond of are those filled with sour cherries or plums. Cherry kind is the messiest one to make because cherries ooze a lot of juice. It is eaten with sweetened juice and a sour-cream. Almost everything is eaten with a sour-cream, lard is the cooking fat of choice in Ukrainian cuisine. Sometimes I make a lazy-holubtsy version, layering pre-cooked cabbage leaves and the mix of meat, rice , onion, garlic and sauteed carrots and sweet pepper in a casserole dish. Mix of sour-cream and tomato souse going on the top.
December 27, 2011 at 11:22 AM
CarbSane said…
Ahh ... lazy holobtsi! Every year I say I'm going to turn the rest of the cabbage into that. LOL. I guess I just get cabbage rolled out. Now that we have a chest freezer in our kitchen, it's easier to think freezing leftovers.

I've had blueberry verenyky at my hubby's aunt's house. Yum! Though mostly I go for savory over sweet. Same aunt used to always make her "famous" bringy (phonetic spelling there) version with goat cheese especially for my husband who absolutely hated them but could never say so! Poor guy choked them down I'm told.

Unfortunately, my late mother in law bought into the margarine advice she was given after she had a heart attack at around 50. (She was one of those skinny fat people I suppose) :( So most stuff that was fried was unfortunately done so in margarine or oil in her home by the time I got to know them. The "traditional" holobtsi of Canadian Ukes is to make them with condensed tomato soup. FWIW, I use the plain tomato sauce from Whole Foods (their generic 365 brand -- it is plenty salty so I add no salt between layers of rolls as one would normally do). Oh gee, now you're making me hungry!
December 27, 2011 at 11:57 AM
bentleyj74 said…
Do you do kolaches or is that too far south?
December 27, 2011 at 12:40 PM
Galina L. said…
Probably, using blueberries is the best way to avoid the mess during the fruit-containing varenyky preparation. Our family spend 3 years in Edmonton, there are a lot of Ukrainian folks in Canada, it is amazing how they keep their traditions. Indeed they use tomato soup for the holubtsy. I usually grab whatever is handy at the moment - tomato souse, chopped fresh or canned tomatoes. Thanks to you, next time I will use a buckwheat instead of rice. Buy the way, the recipe for staffed peppers is pretty much the same, also belongs to the Ukrainian cuisine but costs more, testes better and requires less job. The usual "give and take" scenario.
Heart attack at 50 for a woman is quite extraordinary even if she used a margarine. Probably, it is just a bad lack, or several underlying factors.
December 27, 2011 at 2:12 PM

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