Monday, December 29, 2014

Recap of Rebekah's Christmas Challenge

In an earlier post, I had written how my twenty-year-old daughter Rebekah was lacking in Christmas spirit due to our family situation being vastly different than in Christmases past.

So I challenged her to "make" Christmas for us, without spending money and with using only the resources in these four rooms that comprise our latest home.

Since Rebekah decided to recreate our traditional Eastern European Christmas Eve feast (a modified version), I softened the "no money" edict to allow her to purchase a few key ingredients we did not have. While items were baking and simmering, Rebekah gave Ellis Island a nice cleaning, too.

She ended up making bread (no dairy, flavored with olive oil), bobalki (bread balls i a poppyseed brown sugar syrup, yes I know honey is traditional, she forgot to buy it), pirohi (dumplings stuffed with potatoes and cheese), mushroom soup (button mushrooms, sauerkraut, barley...and hers was better than mine!), spiced apricots, as well as banana bread and chocolate chip cookies for our church's annual in-house caroling party following liturgy the next morning.

She bought two types of olives, sparkling grape juice, split pea soup, baked beans, smoked sausage.

The result was a nice surprise when Timothy came home that night. Stupid us, we forgot to remove the lids before we snapped the picture!


2 comments:

Karin Kendzora said...

I bet the pierogi(Polish for the dumplings) were excellent- What a wonderful tradition to continue- we do it on Christmas eve, with a few variations.

Denise M. Baran-Unland said...

They were! And they keep getting better every year. I taught myself how to make them from a cookbook back in 1983 when I was teaching myself how to cook. My kids were my helpers all these years, and we even taught the kids in the youth group how to make them for church dinners. Now that I have two chefs in the family (who make them far better and faster than I ever did), I've taken a back seat to the process - except for eating them, of course. :)