Merry Christmas 2018 !!!

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.

Dec 25, 2018

For want of family on this sacred holiday, I gave myself some small solace in cooking exciting food from all around the world:

premium cooked ham — mystery but the tin claims to have been inspected in the USA

sweet potatoes in syrup — USA

dark morello cherries — Hungary

peaches with cinnamon — Greece

Terry's Chocolate Orange — Poland

Danish Butter Cookies — Denmark

Maple Leaf Cream Cookies, made with real maple syrup — Canada

The Dream: Spending my Christmas day baking cherry bread, and peach cobbler. Ah, the smell of fresh baked wheat and simmering fruit. My late, great friend Larry Reyka would have loved another slice of my peach cobbler. I wish I could have cooked for kith and kin today, most dearly for my nephews, of whom I have only seen these photographs.

The Reality: I can no longer eat a feast, so I had cherry bread one day, peach cobbler the next day, ham the following day, sweet potatoes on the day after that, and so on. The store-bought cookies were as awful as I remembered them to be, so I have another New Year's Resolution, to bake my own delicious cookies and freeze them—it is easy enough to do. And, this random stranger emailed me a dancing dinosaur GIF singing "I baked you a pie!" A virtual treat but it felt real enough. :-)