So...Christmas happened...

You know the drill -- I cook for two days and they tear through it, leaving carnage and debris, in something south of fifteen minutes. Then they ask for pie.

On Christmas Eve, I made eight dozen cookies and four dozen traditional Bohemian pastries, from my immigrant grandmother's recipe for Kolaches. (They're involved and complicated, we'll get to them in a separate post all their own.)

On Christmas Day, I made the pies, so they would still be slightly warm when they were served. This was possible because my son lives downstairs and I used his oven for the ham and the baked sweet potatoes. Upstairs, I made the sides: Spinach Salad, steamed Brussell's sprouts, rice pilaf, angel biscuits, and a bourbon-and-brown-sugar sauce.

None of that is noteworthy. We eat four or five spinach salads a week, we have Brussell's sprouts at least twice, whole grain rice pilaf is my go-to side dish, and I make fresh bread -- literally every single day -- in my bread machine. Literally nothing about the meal was out of the ordinary, outside the quantity cooked, about anything on the table yesterday.

But pie...that's a different story...

That post is coming along...