Well that escalated quickly. At the beginning of the month I had a calendar full of fun Friendsmas plans, was excited for the holidays and filled with Christmas joy. By the end the month, I was in full pandemic deja vu. Just a couple of things to note this month:

  • In 2019 Jen, Krishna and I started a new Friendsmas tradition of dinner at The Keg Mansion and were excited to go back this year. Welp. That ended up turning into a FaceTime Swiss Chalet dinner, which was still delish, but just not the same. I still wore my sequined dress though!
  • My nephew had a positive Covid case in his class right before the holiday break, so that whole house had to isolate over Christmas, and wasn’t able to host dinner anymore. Instead, I had a small dinner with my parents and the only thing I had to make was a Root Vegetable Crumble (as requested by my Mom). For dessert we had this cookie platter with all the fussy cookies I made as described in this post:
  • Not much else to comment on this month, just many delicious mugs of Homemade Hot Chocolate with Bailey’s, lots of Christmas chocolate (including Mint Chocolate Mini Eggs, which I tried, and am now firmly against), and multiple bags of Hawkins Cheezies while binging TV (more on that below).
  • And now the regular recap of what I was cooking this month, broken down into three categories:
  • Stuff I made from the archives: there wasn’t much cooking happening this month, so nothing got made from the archives
  • Some of my favourite go-to dishes: Pineapple Chicken with Coconut Rice and Rigatoni alla Vodka are both quick and delicious.
  • New things that I tried and liked: I only tried one new recipe this month which was a Butternut Squash Orzo, but it was kind of a bust.

Other non-foodie things I was obsessed with this month:

  • Insecured wrapped up with a perfect series finale and I cried my face off in the last 10 minutes. This is easily one of my favourite all-time shows, I just love it so much.
  • I watched a truly insane amount of TV during my two week break from work over the holidays. I finally finished my slow re-watch of Buffy, and it was kind of cool to watch the last two seasons for the very first time and finally see how the show ended. I also watched and loved Mindy Kaling’s new show The Sex Lives of College Girls, the new season of Selling Sunset, Selling Tampa, Queer Eye, the Harry Potter reunion special and Harlem (and like, did they style the main character’s ex specifically to look like Drake? If so, they succeeded, I loved it).
  • I tried to balance out my TV watching with some reading and loved everything I read over the break: Gabrielle Union’s new memoir (worth a read if only for her story of her dance battle with Bruno Mars at a Grammy Party), Seth Rogan’s book of essays (SO FUNNY), A Holly Jolly Diwali (cute rom-dram) and another third of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (taking especially long as I pause to listen to Binge Mode after every four chapters).

Flashback!