Bad Home Cooking

Holiday Hell: Ginger things

Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised to hear that I was the sort of grade school student who couldn't cut a neat circle out of construction paper to save my soul. Got C's in penmanship all my life (until computers took over and nobody cared anymore). Never met a rapidograph pen that would do my bidding.

Little wonder I'm not a natural when it comes to crafting men out of gingerbread.

But I volunteered to try my hand, so to speak, at making gingerbread men when my daughter, who is following me down the path of extreme procrastination, announced that her "How To" project was due soon and she still hadn't found a cricket bat. Her initial project idea was How To Score in Cricket, and although her dad tried his best to explain the nuances of cricket to her, I don't believe she had a firm enough grasp of it to explain it, in poster form, to anyone else. So I came up with How To Make Gingerbread Men as a quick alternative.

I mean what's less likely to work? A 10-year-old girl trying to explain the inexplicable sport of cricket to a bunch of her American peers or the Bad Home Cook trying to bake a decent gingerbread man? Six of one, half dozen of the other, as the saying goes.

Holiday Hell: No latkes for you

Call it Fear of Frying.

This is the second year in a row I did not make latkes for Hanukkah. The second year in a row I had a recipe at the ready, already taped to my cupboard for easy reference. The second year I had potatoes, onion, matzo meal, but no applesauce. The second year I felt the disappointed eyes of my kids and kin.

All because I'm terrified of frying.

Holiday Hell: Bring on the bourbon balls

I come from a long line of Irish alcoholics. My mother's side of the family has an armory of tales involving  fist-fights, three-week benders, lost weekends, smashed cars and Christmas trees hurled through plate glass windows. I remember a few such doozies from my childhood. And although this has made me fairly humorless when it comes to dealing with alcoholics as an adult, I can still summon a perverse pride in the knowledge that certain members of my family could easily out-drink any frat brother you put before them. You would think such lineage would equip me to drink early and often. And yet my brothers and I have stepped away from the bottle. It's only been recently, in the midst of my middle-aged mommy malaise, that I've developed a relationship with red wine. But ask anyone. I hold my liquor like a 10-year-old.

Nevertheless, they're in there: those miserable Irish alcoholic genes. That's probably why I loved bourbon balls as long as I can remember. They're the perfect holiday sweet: Little balls of cookie dough with nuts rolled in powdered sugar and spiked with alcohol. It's impossible to eat only one. I believe I actually copped a small buzz one year after I ate 17 of them in one sitting. Or maybe that was just the sugar high.