Good riddance

Just because the end of last year sucked mightily, does not mean I didn't send it off with a little flair. (Take THAT, double negative police!)

Yes, I -- who once received a letter from the gas company (while living at my old apartment) asking me if I wanted them to turn off the gas since I had not registered any usage for the past 3 months -- I decided to make a roast beast, with roasted veggies.

The beef eye round had mushrooms, onions, and green peppers which were left swimming in their beer braising sauce while the slab of meat (with its lovely layer of succulent fat) was being carved by my fella. The roasting pan had sweet potatoes, red bliss potatoes, turnips, parsnips, red onions, and shallots -- basically, anything left in my vegetable crisper -- in a light honey glaze (which took me half an hour to scrub off today). Both recipes, are available, by the way, on Recipezaar.com as "Beef 'n' Beer" and "Honey Roasted Root Vegetables".

The only unfortunate experiment was the WW coffee cake I attempted to make for dessert. As the Brits would say, it all went horribly wrong somehow. Since the baking powder is still active, my friend Ellen suggested I perhaps overbeat the batter (whoops) since the cake was half as fluffy as it should have been.

Both my sweetie and my friend Sam were kind enough to say it wasn't inedible (*snarf*) but merely not what one expected. I, however, did not dig it at all, unlike my last (cappuccino angel food cake) misfire. So today I turned it into a much tastier "easy pumpkin bread pudding" (which I edited to 2 cups of 1% milk, down from 4 cups of whole milk, since other readers claimed 6 cups = runny pudding = eeeeeww! and, um, I don't have any whole milk in the house. ever. and oh yeah, I threw in 1/3 cup of dried cranberries).

I also had the urge to make pistachio goat cheese bites (you can once blame Recipezaar for that idea). Tasty but rich -- needs to be eaten with wine, grapes, or something else to offset the cream factor, even though I changed it to 1/3 less fat cream cheese for the "binder".

The goat cheese bites were originally supposed to be for last night (NYE), along with creamed spinach, but (a) I ordered the wrong type of goat cheese from FreshDirect -- the one with a rind -- and (b) even I figured out that perhaps I was channeling my mom and making way too much food.

Well, since it's 3am, I suppose I should quit avoiding sleep....