Serenity & Spice

There was a time when the world thought eating alone was good for your mental and emotional well being. It gave you a break from constantly interacting with other people. You didn’t feel like you had to smooze or make conversation.  You could just enjoy your food. I have eaten alone roughly 700 times this year, give or take, and most of those meals were filled with stress and crushing isolation.  At any moment, I could lose my job, my apartment, my boyfriend, and I almost did. That’s why, for the last post of the year, I wanted to make something delicious.  Shrimp Fra Diavolo is quite possibly one of my favorite dishes.  Spicy tomato sauce with succulent shrimp on a bed of linguine, or any variation thereof, makes my tummy happy. I used the recipe from Chili Pepper Madness . As spicy red peppers are hard to find this time of year, I used a teaspoon of Italian Bomba Hot Pepper Sauce from Trader Joe’s.  A little goes a long way, but so worth it. Who else thought ...

In my last post, I talked about taking pressure off yourself to save your own sanity during the holidays.  It just occurred to me that I may be a bit of a hypocrite as this time, I have probably created the most involved and expensive baking project to date. I present to you traditional mincemeat pies .  Why do I use the word traditional, you ask? Since the Crusades, mince pies have actually included meat until being phased out of the recipe during the Victorian era. The modern version without meat remains a Christmas staple in the United Kingdom. The reason they didn’t quite get the same iconic seasonal status here in the United States is because we were colonized by Puritans who hated Christmas and anything fun. The first step in this three-step process was making candied citrus peel .  Some of the ingredients for the pies were hard to come by, and as no grocery store here carried these, I followed the suggestion in the recipe to make your own. Each step is simple but r...