The original menu wound up with a few tweaks after the testing phase, a few substitutions once I was in the grocery store and couldn’t find a couple of items, and a few total changes when I decided to just totally change things (or just forgot about them).

We normally do a separate Amuse, but decided to just do a bigger appetizer once we (my sister and I) saw these huge new plates my parents had bought.

On Christmas Eve I put some fresh sage and about a cup of whipping cream in a jar and set aside in the refrigerator to marinate? season? make sage yumminess spread to whipping cream. I whipped the cream (leaving in just a few smaller bits of sage) a little before serving time, and the taste of sage was definitely present and delicious. Scallops were seared in olive oil, plated immediately, and then topped with a bit of the sage cream and a dollop of caviar.

The other side of the plate houses an escargot pie. I used a cream cheese crust (1 c butter, 16oz cream cheese [2 c], 3 c flour – mix and form), and filled it with a mix of egg, milk, and butter/garlic sauteed escargots.

Of course nothing is complete without alcohol, and everyone in my family does better after a personality drink, so we make sure to get something extremely yummy so no one will consider not having any.

Have I used the word yummy enough yet? Probably not. I’ll make up for that in part 3.

If I feed my mint plants mint tea, doesn’t that kind of make them cannibals?

What is the likelihood that exotic/wild type animals have ever eaten a person? And how much time needs to pass before a person can safely eat that animal without feeling like a cannibal? I ask this because of the conversation I just had with my father about the weird things we’ve eaten or would eat if presented with the opportunity. We’re both pretty adventurous eaters who will try most things, many of those things are herbivores, but some are not. Like alligator and snake and shark, which we both have had. And after I made a (hilarious) joke, we both laughed and then got quiet. Shit. But it isn’t like we caught the damn things and brought them home to cook, having no idea about their origins or history. We were at restaurants – restaurants that weren’t in Third World countries (mostly). Restaurants that have to source their ingredients from reputable places. They were probably farmed somewhere, thus eliminating any possible human meals.

What animals are most likely to have eaten a person? Alligators, big big snakes, komodo dragons, hyenas, wild dogs, big cats (like lions and panthers), vultures. That’s an easy list to avoid for the future.

A few years ago, maybe 2006?, my sister and I decided that this whole buying Christmas gifts for our parents was totally crap, and we weren’t having any more of it. Instead we made the Christmas Dinner the gift. Until then we had always had turkey et al for Christmas dinner; now we put together a 7 course meal complete with wine pairings. I act as the chef, and my sister is the sommelier. Each year we pick a theme and base the menu around it; we’ve had a cheese theme, a seafood theme, and this year we decided on:

A Time for Luxury: 7 courses, 6 drinks, much merriment

The drink: Champagne

The Amuse Bouche – Mini escargot quiche

The Appetizer – Caviar on toast points

The drink: probably a Sherry, but really, whatever is good to soak chestnuts in

The Salad – Roasted chestnut, apple, and squash with Boston lettuce, warm goat’s cheese, and a vinaigrette

The drink: something with alcohol, who gives a shit by this point?

The Soup – Creamy mushroom soup with truffle oil (because as much as I love my parents, I’m not buying actual truffles)

The Sorbet – Champagne sorbet (though this time it’ll just be something cheap and bubbly)

The drink: some sort of white wine

The Entrée – Lobster Newberg with some sort of vegetable and either saffron rice or saffron mashed potatoes

The drink: Sweet warm milk with brandy

The Dessert – Chocolate 3 layer cake, vanilla bean cream, strawberry filling, dusted with edible gold

Should be yummy!

When someone tells me that they’re doing a ‘cleanse’ I usually have to try not to roll my eyes. As soon as cleanses are introduced into a discussion, toxins are not far behind. It’s embarrassing. I have to tune out of the conversation in order to maintain respect for the person I’m talking to. Would you like to buy some Kinoki foot pads? No, that’s foolish – everybody knows that the only way to get rid of toxins is through the digestive tract. Alternatively, wearing the t-shirts offered in my GurgleSlurp shop are a surefire way to extract toxins from your chest and back, protecting the heart and vital organs. In fact, if you’re not wearing a GurgleSlurp shirt, toxins are already causing irreparable harm!

So anyway, I’m doing this cleanse.

Yeah, I know.

Every once in a while my post Ulcerative Colitis tummy starts to hurt. Nothing to call the Gastroenterologist over – a colonoscopy would reveal a perfect colon. It just hurts. The cure is just to stop eating for a couple of days, but that pretty much sucks too. I hate being hungry. I’d rather have a tummy ache than hunger pangs. So instead, I figured I would try a ‘cleanse’ of some sort.

I have the whole UC thing to work around so all of the pro poop cleanses were out of the question. I didn’t want anything that lasted more than a few days – so none of those 3 week no meat no cheese no gluten no anything you might actually want to eat plans. I didn’t just want to drink fruit juices – I can eat sugar for days on end, but I don’t really like to drink it – but I also wanted to avoid a lot of chewing. Also, I don’t really want to lose any weight, so it would have to have enough calories in it. So I tried one of the shakes and vegetable juice plans.

Today was day one. And I think I might be done with it. The shakes are disgusting! The vegetable juice is okay, but … the shakes are disgusting! Who could drink this more than once? Maybe if I believed in toxins I could scare myself into drinking it, but I don’t, so I can’t. Maybe it’ll be better in my porridge, that’s a chew free meal.

Maybe I should just stop having chocolate for breakfast.

The best thing about my Ulcerative Colitis is unquestionably the post therapy bingefest. I take a drug called Remicade (Infliximib) by way of IV infusion, every couple months. It’s a TNF Alpha inhibitor, which prevents my colon from responding to my immune system, thus keeping me from having inflammation, and you know, dying. To help prevent my system from forming antibodies against the drug, I get a big shot of Cortisone (a steroid) beforehand. I usually get that at about 10 am, and by noon I’m pretty famished.

When you’re prescribed a steroid you can expect to gain some weight, this isn’t because the drug makes you gain weight – it’ll shift some fat stores, which sometimes equally sucks, but it won’t cause direct weight gain. What it will do, is completely prevent your brain from receiving the signal that your stomach is full.

And it’s awesome. Every bite is a quest to sate the insatiable. Every morsel is enjoyed like a jealousy guarded delicacy. And my body feels great. My brain can’t tell me that I’m stuffed, so it’s impossible to feel icky. I stop because my tongue begins to ache and my teeth have tired of chewing.

My Cortisone shot only has this effect for a few days, but I only indulge in the binge on day one; if I do this for even two days in a row I will cease to comfortably fit into my pants.