tree un-trimming dinner

If you cook for people, I've found, you can con them into most anything. And so it was with Frank tonight.

In past years, we've been so bad as to leave the tree up until February. Busy lives. Some sort of excuse like that. I dunno. Anyway, we did get the tree un-decorated this evening as well as taken down, and Frank was great help in accomplishing that. By the end of it all, he might have wished otherwise. I mean look, we're gay men, we go a little overboard with decorations. And imagine if we hadn't sent a bunch up to Vancouver!

Oh, it wasn't so very onerous a task, really.



We munched on cheese and olives and almonds and sipped a Domaine de Chaberton Gamay Noir before we attacked the tree. Once it was denuded and taken down, I served up dinner.

Here's the funny thing about me: people give me cookbooks because they know I love food, but I don't necessarily devour the cookbooks right away. It depends. It's no commentary on the books, really. I buy music (CDs back in the day, online now) and then don't listen to it for some time. Just the way I am. So it is that I finally opened up a cookbook the NBF sent me, for my last birthday, I think. I wanted a stew, but in flipping through the pages of the Jamie Oliver book, I found a better-looking recipe for chicken cacciatore than ever I'd seen before. Hmmmm.




Jeph, my friend, it was a great success. Not too many ingredients. Easy to cook. A delicious outcome. I'll be dipping back into that back, I promise, and soon. Once hooked, I'll return again and again.

Alongside the chicken I had a salad of butter lettuce, yellow tomato, radish, fennel, and blood orange. It's a great time of year for citrus, so I was pleased to have the blood orange for colour and for some tangy zing.

We looked at photos - Frank's and ours - and I brought over some cookies, cheeses, my Mum's rum balls, and slices of Asian pear. A simple dessert, but a generous one.

So, the tree is down, and the decorations will go down into storage tomorrow. I guess Christmas is over. Mind you, given the snowfall of the last 24 hours, that's a little hard to believe. Ah well... 11 weeks until New Zealand!

And that is the update from Chicago - a week of no blogging while I've babied myself through a cold. There's not too much point photographing and blogging the very simple food I've made for myself, or that I've ordered for delivery. The cold is gone. Let's see what the week ahead brings.