WHEW. With that, the Christmas season has come to a close. New Years is right around the corner and everyone has joined a new gym and we're almost done cleaning up after Christmas Eve Dinner. Almost. Leftovers? Still in the fridge. Christmas cookies? Still on a 3-a-day diet. Might have to up it to 4. All in all the Holiday was a good time for just about everyone. We've picked up the tradition of  hosted a big dinner on Christmas Eve for both of our families and some close friends every year. Last year we tackled a beef wellington dish and had four other courses. This year we toned it down just a little, preparing a rack of pork with sides and French onion soup. The meal definitely created a sense of fullness which really set the trend for the rest of the next two days. After dinner we sat around the

Don't you love it when life gets in the way of your most well made plans? We've got a week's worth of Candies, another week's worth of Cookies and so far have gotten to posting practically none of it. Go us. Surprisingly our candy stocks have been hanging on this year. Last year, everything we made was gone practically by the end of the day but this year it looks like a lot of it is going to last until Christmas day. Whats not going to last are these babies: Cookie Dough Truffles. Now we both are well aware of the fact that raw egg can give you salmonella. We are also both well aware that there is raw egg in cookie dough. It is additionally not uncommon to see either of us sneaking little giant spoonfuls of cookie dough whenever its in the house. Eric has been known to snipe balls of

CHRISTMAS CANDY! In case you haven't noticed, we're basically little kids who have jobs. We get excited about things like Disneyland, Birthday Parties and playing video games. So maybe its mostly Eric that gets excited about video games, but lets not split hairs here because the biggest thing that we get really kid like excited about is Christmas, which in our house starts exactly the moment Santa comes down the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It would actually start a lot earlier except Eric puts his big grinchy foot down and strictly prohibits Christmas movies and Christmas Carols from New Years to Thanksgiving which makes Charisse all the more eager to sneak them in when he's not around. Its pretty funny to see how mad Eric can get when he hops in Charisse's car and discovers jingle bells in the CD player. But once that magical season starts we're up in

There are really only two foods Charisse won't eat: raw celery and eggnog. Eric on the other hand? Loves eggnog. Raw celery? Well we're not as different as it seems. Now when Charisse started mixing up our ice cream for this post, there was a small shock when she said she was making eggnog. Looks like she does love her husband after all. Now the last time we made ice cream we ran into the problem that it was too icy, we'd tried to make a egg free ice cream and it just wasn't creamy enough. The egg really smooths the ice cream out and lets it keep that traditional ice cream consistency. We were putting together a fun little dinner just the two of us and Charisse wanted to take another crack at the ice cream maker and Eric had a hankering for eggnog. This time, it was perfect: creamy, a

All of your wonderful submissions for our bacon marmalade contest have been lip linkingly good! We were so  excited about doing our first contest / giveaway that we wound up doing our own entry on Tuesday night! We put together a creamy bacon and mushroom polenta that definitely rocked the polenta world. We pushed off posting this just in case anyone came up with the same idea, and if you did, then you might just win! So far I haven't seen it done yet, but theres still time left as we write this! Fall is coming to a very wintery finish here in the Bay Area and the Christmas season has gotten into full swing. Christmas stuff everywhere? Check. Certain closets / drawers / rooms people are not allowed to look in? Check. A front yard thats so bright it can be seen from space? Double Check. It also means nearly everything we cook

A short time ago we were contacted by the wonderful Lisa Orgler over at The Lunch Box Project about drawing a picture based on one of our recipes, the Nectarine Cupcakes from back in August. Of course we were excited to have someone inspired by our recipes and are happy to say that the piece came out really good! Lisa is selling prints of her work through her site, so head over there and say "hi!"Also, don't forget to visit our Bacon Marmalade post and enter to win a jar of your very own!

We work really hard not to repeat recipes or do too much that is really similar to what we've done before but sometimes you have to break the rules. Earlier we did a whole meal using bacon in some form in each course. And some of the highlights may have got a bit lost in the overwhelmingly large bacon friendly meal, specifically the bourbon bacon marmalade. We had a whole bunch of this leftover and served it on burgers for Eric's birthday party the next day and you've never seen a pack of hungry wolves devour something so quickly. The whole bowl vanished in less than an hour, walking out on hot dogs, bread slices and BBQ bacon cheeseburgers because hey, what goes with bacon better than bacon? Anyway we decided that for Christmas we would recreate this marmalade and can it, making a fun gift to give out to

Who remembers loving crackerjacks when they had actual toys inside? Did that just fill your head with all kinds of childhood memories? Maybe an old time baseball game or kicking around with friends or a visit to the dentist because your filling got pulled out?  Yeah, us too. Okay, maybe not the filling part but growing up crackerjack was a wonderful treat. All kinds of goofy trinkets and toys, mini baseball cards in there with the caramel popcorn and roasted nuts. We were at our friends Steve and Sarah's house the other week while Sarah was putting together a batch or spicy caramel corn. With our candy day coming up Charisse wanted some practice making caramel and what could be better to practice with than some good old fashioned caramel corn? Armed with a pot, a candy thermometer popcorn and various forms of sugar Charisse put together a most amazing candied snack ever. Once