Either way, in the 38th Annual Clarke-Odell New Year’s Eve Food-Gorging Festival, we may have found the answer for an age-appropriate celebration to kick an old year to the curb and welcome the possibilities of a new one.
It is, in a
(hyphenated) word: make-ahead.
It seems
every year we’ve done this, somebody has been under the weather. This year it
was Vonnie’s turn, and that proved to be the catalyst for our discovery of the joys of
make-ahead.
Despite George’s adventures in heart surgery over the past couple of years, Linda also reprised Julia’s scalloped potatoes, which are worth every milligram of cholesterol. Vonnie also assembled appetizers, put the salad together and bought the Catalina dressing to put on it and fabulous little personal bundt cakes for dessert, thus illustrating a secondary learning: why spend hours making something you can simply go buy?
Voila! No muss, no fuss New Year’s Eve dinner and morning-after breakfast.
A down-side of the make-ahead approach, or maybe given our ages, an up-side: we finished eating, with table cleared and dishes rinsed, by 8 p.m., leaving Linda to check where in the world it might already be 2017, in case we wanted to do an out-of-time-zone toast and call it a wrap.
Ultimately,
we hung on for awhile longer, and a fifth guest joined us: Amazon
Echo’s Alexa. While we watched the Clarkes’ recording of the Tony Bennett 90th
birthday concert (check out Leslie Odom Jr’s swoon-worthy rendition of Autumn Leaves,”) and later as New Year’s Rockin’ Eve proceeded, we discussed
various issues of the day and when a question came up, tossed it to Alexa, who
responded with aplomb and apparent accuracy.
Sadly Alexa could do nothing to save Mariah Carey’s live televised performance of… we’re not sure what because she didn’t perform it, apparently due to technical difficulties. But the artificially intelligent voice from a speaker is knowledgeable about many things. Alexa’s responses to such inquiries as “when did Eddie Fisher die and at what age?” added a dimension of educational enrichment to our post-meal/pre-toasting activities.
Stimulating the brain is important when you’re 38 years into anything.
Sometime
before 10 p.m. we declared 2017 underway and popped the cork, so we
could all be snug in our beds long before our respective neighbors’ fireworks
announced the actual turn of the year in our time zone. Make-ahead apparently leads to go-ahead, which
is just fine.
Breakfast
the next morning was similarly stress-free and completed in time for the
Odells to return home, where Tom had a date with a yard rake and an enormous
pile of sweet gum spiny balls before settling in to watch the
Chiefs win a football game.
Thus, we
entered 2017, with all its fears, possibilities, uncertainties and blessings. We
are alive and well, so are our families, including two new
Clarke grandbabies since last we blogged – the precious Sophia Graece Tunley
and her brand-new cousin, Quinn Rose Urbanowicz. The old folks may be somewhat
scarred by the combined forces of wear, tear and gravity, but as long as we can
enjoy our times together, it will be a very good year indeed.
Check the
links embedded above for some of our recipes and
see below for Vonnie’s make-ahead breakfast egg, sausage and bacon casserole.
Breakfast Casserole (Vonnie's adaptation)
1 lb pork sausage
1 lb bacon
10 eggs
3 cups milk
1 1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt
8 slices bread, cubed
1 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
Brown sausage and bacon, drain well. Chop bacon. Beat eggs, pour into buttered 9x13 pan, add rest of ingredients, then meat. Let stand overnight, covered, in refrigerator. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour and 10 minutes.
P.S. If you’re looking for a summary of New Year’s Eve 2015, and we're sure you are, you’re out of luck. Never got around to chronicling it. Maybe someday, Alexa can fix procrastination, too. For now, though, getting stuff like that done, or not, is still up to the humans.
Breakfast Casserole (Vonnie's adaptation)
1 lb pork sausage
1 lb bacon
10 eggs
3 cups milk
1 1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt
8 slices bread, cubed
1 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
Brown sausage and bacon, drain well. Chop bacon. Beat eggs, pour into buttered 9x13 pan, add rest of ingredients, then meat. Let stand overnight, covered, in refrigerator. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour and 10 minutes.
P.S. If you’re looking for a summary of New Year’s Eve 2015, and we're sure you are, you’re out of luck. Never got around to chronicling it. Maybe someday, Alexa can fix procrastination, too. For now, though, getting stuff like that done, or not, is still up to the humans.
