Merry Christmas

For what it's worth, Merry Christmas to all you Vailains, new, old and past. May all your Christmases be bright!

Cookies, cake,and egg nog for everyone. MERRY X-MAS

No cake for me! Hey, Wraith! Guess what I cooked for Christmas Eve dinner at Mom and Dad's place!

Piccy

Piccy

Piccy

Go on. Guess.

Also, a cool Yule to all y'all!

Awwww, that looks delicious!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!!!

I wish i had taken pictures of my din dins now too.... all went well and i got really nice presents. hope your days were good guys

Wraith wrote:

Awwww, that looks delicious!!!

It was delicious! The supermarket was out of zucchini and yellow squash, so I substituted cucumber (skinned and deseeded) and butternut squash instead. It still turned out good.

I'm going to assume that your guess was "squashburger fritters," yes?

(I also substituted red onions for yellow onions, just like you suggested. Am I a good boy for doing that?)

Wraith wrote:

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!!!

Aww, Merry Christmas to you too! And yes, I understand how the hospitality industries are all hyper-busy until January 2nd. I'm in hospitality too; I just have a particularly cushy Third Shift job, that's all.

Wraith wrote:

I wish i had taken pictures of my din dins now too.... all went well and i got really nice presents. hope your days were good guys

We wish that you had taken pictures of your din dins too, considering that you do this for a living and could probably trounce my displays of kitchen witchery quite soundly.

Mom and Dad gave me three new golf shirts (which I like to wear, even though I don't play golf), a chicken calendar, a metal "Caution: Chicken with Attitude" sign for my chicken run, a box of sweet red sangria wine...and a DVD copy of Shaun of the Dead. I gave them a two-player TV-plug-in The Walking Dead video game (a first-person shooter with two colorful controllers made up like pump-action shotguns), since Mom likes to watch The Walking Dead and Dad likes to shoot things. So Mom and Dad played it, I took over whenever one of them needed a break and we ended up beating the Story Mode, even if the final battle where you have to take a sniper rifle and protect Glenn from several hordes of walkers was a royal pain (and demanded several Continues). So it's been a very zombie Christmas for me and my family.

How 'bout all y'all?

Continuing the tradition:

Even though we are silent for the moment, you are not forgotten this Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas everyone!

MERRRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!!!!

Hope everyone gets what they want for Christmas.  For those with kids hopefully your munchkins won't get you up too early or drive you too nuts with the toys they are getting.

To Wraith and Shadow here's to your first Christmas as parents.

GoldenDrakon wrote:

You forgot Rudolph.

And Feliz Navidad a ustedes tambien. We'll all come back around after we're out of eggnog, I'm sure.

Four of you people should be receiving cards today. You have precisely thirty days to post photos of yourselves wearing the enclosed badges. Lord Vader commands it!

Also, I'm just dropping in for a moment before I get the meat and its marinade out of the fridge. This year, our international dish is Jamaican jerk pork and chicken! I've had the pork and chicken marinating in the jerk rub all night, so it should be good and ready now. Dad should be able to grill it while Mom and I are working at Walmart until 9 PM. Then it's time for a Jamaican dinner! Pics may follow soon.

Merry Christmas one and all.

As requested here is a picture of me wearing the patch that you sent me. Enjoy Dudes

Now how did I just know that you would find some way to comply with the letter of my request but not with the spirit of my request?

So when did you start growing a beard, anyway?

Anyway...so three years ago, in this very same thread, I began a new Christmas tradition of picking a random nation from among the 200-odd nations on this planet and cooking a dish from that nation's cuisine for our Christmas dinner.  In 2011, I chose France, and so I cooked ratatouille for Christmas, as seen several posts back.  And it was good.

In 2012, I chose Russia.  And so I cooked borscht for Christmas.  And it was good, perhaps even better than the ratatouille.

In 2013, I chose Poland.  And so I cooked pierogi for Christmas.  And it was fairly good, but not quite as good as the ratatouille and the borscht were.  Plus, half of the dumplings kept disintegrating while they were boiling in the stew pot.  So while Mom liked the pierogi, I myself felt that they were a miss made all the more pronounced by following those two solid hits from Russia and France.  Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately, if I wish to save face), all photos of my pierogi remain trapped on my old Virgin Mobile cell phone, unable to be transferred to my computer or to the internet in any way.

After the Pierogi Christmas, I tried something new and let Google help with picking a random nation on the entire planet.  Its first choice was Bahrain, a little Islamic island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia.  Bahrain's mostly desert, so the Bahrainis don't have diddly-jack in the way of cuisine aside from imported dates and whatever birds and rodents they manage to catch.  Pass.  Then it picked the Pitcairn Islands, home to the whopping 50 descendants of Fletcher Christian, the rest of the mutineers who hijacked the HMS Bounty, and whichever Tahitian natives were unlucky enough to come along with them.  Their cuisine sucks too.  Pass.  Then it picked Saint Kitts and Nevis.  Their "cuisine" mostly consists of rum and bumbo...not enough caliber for a Christmas dinner.  So then Mom and I got to thinking.  "Well, Saint Kitts and Nevis are a two-island nation in the Caribbean Sea.  What's another Caribbean island?  Ooh, Jamaica!"  So we chose Jamaican cuisine for this year's Christmas dinner, and a Jamaican dish from that: Jamaican jerk barbecue, specifically Jamaican jerk pork and Jamaican jerk chicken.  And here's the recipe we used.  We just halved the requisite amount of pork and substituted that half with chicken, and we substituted the scotch bonnet peppers with jalapeños (since none of us have ever seen a scotch bonnet in our entire lives, and our local grocery stores certainly don't carry them).

And lo, it was great...so great that Mom and I disagree on which of our international dishes was the best.  She thinks that the ratatouille remains the champ, while I feel that the Jamaican jerk barbecue stole that Title Belt from the borscht.  There truly is no accounting for taste.

So what did you people cook for the many-named Winter Equinox holiday this year?  

The House of Ainsley wrote:

Now how did I just know that you would find some way to comply with the letter of my request but not with the spirit of my request?  

The answer to this question is simple.  You are my friend and know me well enough to know that I would find some smart ass way to fulfill your request.  Hey it's what I do.  
 

The House of Ainsley wrote:

So when did you start growing a beard, anyway?  

Technically it is a goatee not a beard and I've only had it a few months.  Just trying it out to see how I look

Goatees are beards, as are any hairy formations sprouting from one's chin and jaw. They just happen to be small beards, but beards no less.

Okay Mr smarty pants.

You're the one using a jacket badge as an eyepatch, and I'm the smartypants?

Merry Christmas you old vagabonds! Hope that it is a good day for you!!

Hope y'all had a cool Yule today!  Maybe now that Christmas is come and gone (and with it, all the hooplah that Walmart throws over Christmas for two months beforehand), things will be a bit more calm around here.  

I have to be back at Walmart in 8 hours (0600 hours) to help open the store, so I'm off to bed now.  After I get home, I'll show all y'all the photos I took of this year's Christmas dish: Coconut-boiled shrimp, courtesy of the island nation of Tonga.  The shrimp was good.  See ya tomorrow!  

Merry Chirstmas Dudes. May you and your family get all the presents you desire.

Late, but enjoy!



Christmas pics to come as soon as I get them off my phone....

Merry Late Christmas to all

and a Happy New Year !!!

Hope you all had a great Christmas. May the New Year be even better!!!

Hope you all had a great Christmas. May the New Year be even better!!!