Festive Foods Friday Five

Courtesy of our fun friends at RevGalBlogPals...

Well friends, we've covered advent, music, and movies/TV--but we here at F5 HQ would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that quintessential holiday topic... fooooooooood.

1. Favorite cookie/candy/baked good without which, it's just not Christmas.

Well, this year your intrepid blogger is toughing it out sans sugar and flour for health reasons... but in a normal Christmas season there would be two necessary confections: Melting Moments and Rum Balls.

My mother was never much of a baker, so I ferreted out other women to teach me the fine art of cookie-making as a very young woman. When I was in high school I tore out the middle of a December issue of Good Housekeeping, and all my favorite Christmas cookie recipes over the years came from those pages. For those of you who have never had the pleasure, Melting Moments are delicate cookies made with cornstarch and confectioners' sugar, giving them a soft, fine, melt-in-your-mouth texture. In my favorite recipe the cookies are glazed with a mixture of confectioners' sugar and orange juice.

2. Do you do a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, both, or neither? (Optional: with whom will you gather around the table this year?)

Our family tradition on Christmas Eve is Angel Hair pasta (yes! for the angels!) with Rosetta sauce (a kind of virgin-vodka sauce-- also theologically appropriate!). This is quick for those of us who-- ahem-- have other obligations that night. Christmas Day we used to have a big feast of standing rib roast and Yorkshire pudding, food still beloved by my family. However, in view of the busy nature of the week for clergy types, and in honor of the endless loop of "A Christmas Story" on TBS, we began ordering Chinese food about five years ago. We have never gone back.

3. Evaluate one or more of the holiday beverage trifecta: hot chocolate, wassail, egg nog.

Love hot chocolate-- with marshmallows, thank ye kindly-- never had wassail, and adore egg nog, minus the rum.

4. Candy canes: do you like all the new-fangled flavors or are you a peppermint purist?

Peppermint. Otherwise the stupid story falls apart.

5. Have you ever actually had figgy pudding? And is it really so good that people will refuse to leave until they are served it?

Yes! Well, it's an acquired taste, I would say, and after a big dinner it's hard to imagine getting the enthusiasm for this dense, incredibly sweet dessert. But we have obsessed about dense, incredibly sweet desserts before, and so we have empathy for the carolers/ wassailers of yore.