Happy New Year!

A large, rollicking party, loud with noisemakers and awash in champagne, like something Nick and Nora Charles would attend?  Or a quiet evening by the fire, watching Ryan Seacrest and trying not to miss Dick Clark (but at the same time wishing Dick Clark would just let it go, when his infirm self shows up at the end of the show) and having a glass of dry sherry at midnight?  Hard to say.  New Year's Eve is tricky.  If you go out there are always expectations of romance and revelations, both of which seldom appear.  And those expectations often seem to turn New Year's Eve into a disappointment.  Then sometimes you just get together with a couple of friends, some spaghetti, and some champagne and you end up dancing til three o'clock in the morning.  So yes, I think New Year's Eve is tricky.  For me the key is minimal expectations so that I'm sure I won't be disappointed, but I also leave room to be pleasantly surprised.

Usually we have fondue for a late dinner.  But this year, with semi-adult children coming and going, and not being sure who will be here when, I've opted out of the cheese-fest.  Leftover fondue is never a good thing.  So this year we are going with the aforementioned spaghetti, along with meatballs, sausages, and garlic bread.  And the alcohol may or may not flow--we'll just see how the evening goes.

When the children were little, I would make a two layer cake for dessert.  Then I would cut up a few 3 x 5 cards into four pieces, and write a fortune on each piece.  Fortunes don't need to be elaborate:  "the tooth fairy will visit before the summer's end" or "you will meet a new friend who will become dear to you" or "great luck, happiness, and wealth will soon be yours" (may as well think big).  You get the idea. Wrap each fortune in foil, and then punch a hole in the foil-covered card.  Tie a piece of curling ribbon to each fortune, leaving the ends about eighteen inches long, then curling the ends.  Put the first layer of the cake on a plate, level the top, and frost the sides and top.  Lay the fortunes on top, with the ribbons sticking out, draping down over the sides of the first layer. Place the second layer on top, sandwiching the fortunes between the two layers, and frost the sides and top of the top layer.  Now you have a cake with colorful, curly ribbons sticking out.  Take turns gently pulling out fortunes and reading them aloud.

We'd also do M&M fortune telling (apparently I'm big on fortune-telling).  Take a handful of M&Ms and reveal your future.  Red: self-confidence;  blue: wealth;  orange: love;  yellow: geekiness (can be cancelled out if you also have red and blue);  green: wishes (make a wish for each green one you have);  brown: health.  It's kind of fun, very easy, suitable for all ages.

Now of course New Year's Eve tends to be somewhat alco-centric, and I've been seeing a lot of hangover cures online.  You do know there are no hangover cures, right?  Time is the only thing that really cures a hangover, and prevention is the only way to buffer the after-effects of your debauchery.  No, I'm not saying you have to have a dry New Year's.  Rather, there are a few things I have found, through some rather unscientific experimentation, that help you to survive the next day, because there's nothing worse than that feeling of being afraid you might die of your hangover, and also of being afraid you won't.  First of all, water is the biggest key.  Before you even start to party, have a bottle or two of water.  Start out hydrated and it won't be so hard to keep hydrated (the hangover headache is mostly due to dehydration).  Eat.  Regularly. If you are going somewhere where a proper meal is not on offer, have a peanut butter sandwich before you go. At bedtime have a snack and another bottle (maybe two) of water.  A couple of spoonfuls of honey at bedtime is, for some reason, very helpful.  And then Advil.  I take four, but you should probably stick to the recommendations on the bottle as I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV.  So the bedtime regime is a snack, water, honey, Advil, more water, then bed.

I'm not even going to remind you not to drink and drive because you are not an idiot and wouldn't do anything that dumb.

So it might not be a New Year's Eve Nick and Nora would relish, but we've had a stressful year and the idea of some quiet revelry is very appealing.  Next year will be better than this one--good riddance to 2011, hello 2012!

Happy New Year!

A Mother's Day Punch

"Punch" the drink, not "punch" the physical violence.  That wouldn't be a very good Mother's Day.  But "punch" the drink makes for a very nice Mother's Day (or any other time you are having company for brunch or lunch).  This extremely quaffable libation  is not expensive, it is delicious, and it'll keep both your minimal-drinker friends (and mothers) happy and your wino-in-training friends (and mothers) happy. It works well for a brunch or a lunch, which is perfect since you don't hear a lot about Mother's Day dinners (probably because Mom's usually back on duty by dinnertime).  The fruit juice seems to eliminate the headache that can come with drinking early in the day,  and you can feel slightly virtuous because it is, after all, fruit juice.  And you can feel stylish, too, because punch seems to be turning up more and more as a cost-effective, but still delicious, way to get a large group of people liquored up (and of course I mean that in the most genteel way).

Confession:  this is not a picture of my actual punch (even though it looks just like it).  I didn't happen to have any photos of punch lying around, and making a batch of punch just for a photo shoot seemed rather wasteful.  And if I had made it I'd have felt compelled to drink it, and...well, no good could have come of that situation. I mean, it's Tuesday.  Morning.   So I cribbed this picture off the internet.  Mea culpa.

Here's an interesting tidbit:  the word "punch" is from the Indian (or Urdu? I can't remember) word for "five," and a traditional punch always had five ingredients (and now you can see why a "punch" in the nose is called that--Good Lord, more physical violence!).

On to the task at hand.

First of all, a day or two before you are serving the punch, make an ice block.  I like to slice up a lemon and/or an orange (it looks prettiest with both, but use whatever you have), and then place the fruit in a small container ( a square 4-cup Gladware is perfect for the size of my punch bowl).  Put lots of fruit in--you want it to look like a block of frozen fruit, not like an iceberg adrift in your punch bowl.  Then fill the container with water. Place it in the freezer.  After about two hours, push the fruit down into the slushy water (but if the water isn't "thick" enough yet, come back in a little while) so that there is fruit throughout the block of ice, not just floating at the top.  Freeze at least overnight.

Brunch/Lunch Punch

1 (6 oz.) can frozen lemonade concentrate

32 oz. pineapple-orange juice  (I buy a half-gallon of Dole, in the carton, and just use half)

1 bottle well-chilled dry California white wine

1 bottle well-chilled brut California sparkling wine

Mix lemonade concentrate and pineapple-orange juice in punch bowl.  Add bottle of white wine. I usually use an inexpensive (but certainly not rot-gut) sauvignon blanc. (I specified California because hey--we live less than an hour away from one of the world's greatest wine producing regions, and if that's not being a locavore, I don't know what is).  Add ice block. Gently pour bottle of sparkling wine down the side (the inside--do I have to say that?) of the punch bowl (helps minimize carbonation loss) and serve immediately.

Feel free to top up the punch bowl with more champagne and/or more pineapple-orange juice as  it gets drunk. I can't tell you exactly how much this will serve, due to whether you use those funny little cups that come with the punch bowl, or some heftier, more, uh, thirst-quenching-size glasses.  At my house recently,  seven  people (with large glasses, not the little cups) were kept amply hydrated for the afternoon with these amounts.