Eggnog & Brandy Balls

Holiday Brandy-stravagansa

I don't know about you, but for me holidays can be stressful times. Traveling to be with your loved ones, being with your loved ones, having to talk to your loved ones — all of these things are leading stressors that, when combined with the general blahs of a season without the sun, can really depress people.

Nothing cures depression like a depressant! If we have to spend our time in unpleasant familial obligations, we might as well get smashed.

Eggnog? More like Yay-gnog!

Because what are the holdiays if not an excuse to drink?

Okay, I'm playing up the booze angle here a bit but let me be frank: I effing love eggnog. No lie. Every year the delicious reappearance of eggnog has always been the high point of the holiday season. I even love the non-alcoholic kind you can buy in stores. For years this was my favorite seasonal drink.

Homemade eggnog blows that processed stuff out of the water.

Putting the Egg in Eggnog

We used four eggs in our nog, beating 1/3 cup of sugar into the yolks and putting the whites aside. The base was two cups of whole milk and a cup of half-and-half (though you can use anything up to heavy cream) seasoned with a teaspoon of nutmeg. Some people don't bother cooking their eggnog, but it's a general good practice whenever you're doing anything with eggs — Rocky Balboa notwithstanding.

We brought the milk mixture to a quick boil and combined it with the yolk-sugar. The trick is to to pour the hot milk into the yolks (not the other way around!) slowly enough to avoid accidentally cooking the yolks — something that would be pretty unpleasant. After you've combined the milk and eggs you'll want to slowly raise the temperature back to 160 F.

We used half a cup of brandy, but you could easily substitute rum. Not adding booze is an affront to Saint Nick. Set the whole thing into the fridge to just chill for a bit — a few hours will do the trick.

While the milk/yolk/booze is chilling you're going to want to whip the egg whites with an electric beater until they form soft peaks. Gradually add another tablespoon of sugar and keep beating until stiff peaks have formed. Once the milk/yolk/booze is cold, whisk the meringue into the milk mixture.

Chill With the Eggnog Already

Don't make the same mistake we did. After the whisking your eggnog will still be separated. If you drink it now, you'll have this weird head on top of watery nog that is still okay, but not great. We let the rest of it sit overnight, and discovered that it settled into an amazing drink if you just leave it alone for awhile. It was fresh, creamy, thick, and best of all, delicious.

Wrap Your Lips Around These Brandy Balls

Fun Fact: You can raise your blood alcohol level without drinking. Many recipes call for various amounts of potent alcohol, and not all of them burn off the "get you drunk" bits when cooking. For good reason, many of these sorts of recipes are used and consumed during the holidays.

Chocolate brandy balls are really good, and really strong.

Kill the Wabbit

This is another recipe that you can substitute rum for the brandy — if you're a complete philistine. The chocolate part of our brandy balls comes from crushed chocolate wafers. You're free to use vanilla wafers instead — if you're a total racist. We couldn't find the exact sort we wanted at the store, so we actually used some chocolate graham-cracker rabbit things, and it worked out just fine.

Anyway, you need chocolate crumbs, so we basically threw two-and-a-half cups of the rabbits into a ziplock bag and I wailed on them with the bottom of the measuring cup until they were all smashed up good. I'm good at the smashing.

Gently Roll Them In Your Hands

We also nuked a cup of chocolate chips until they were melted as a base, and into that we mixed the rabbit crumbs, 3 tablespoons of maple syrup, 1/2 cup of sugar, a cup of chopped nuts, and 1/2 cup of brandy. After chilling this stuff for about an hour, we hand rolled teaspoon-sized portions of this mixture into balls, then rolled the balls through a bowl of sugar to coat them.

Chill With the Balls Already

Now, maybe you have more patience than I do. Maybe you're a goddamn perfectionist saint. Maybe you can resist the allure of these delicious and potent chocolate morsels — if you can, you're a better man than I. Ideally you want to put the balls in an airtight container and chill them for from a few days to a few weeks to let them age — apparently, they only get better and better. I can't say, because Kat and I ate them all the next day, and they were pretty damn good.

Pumpkin Carving and Seed Spooktacular

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. When I was a little kid it wasn't so much about the candy as it was about the dressing up and running around in the dark. As I got older, though, the tradition lost much of its luster – not because I was "growing up" or anything so trite and juvenile, but because the trick-or-treating was set earlier and earlier in the day out of community and parental fears.

It got less fun, and as it did Halloween parties and other activities became more fun. Pumpkin Carving has been one of those traditions that has never gotten any less fun. Like cooking, it can be a friendly and intimate social activity.

Pumpkin Carving

Some people just start cutting on a pumpkin freestyle, but I like to give myself an idea of what I'm working with ahead of time. Using a sharpie I drew on what I hoped was a spooky face. Pumpkins are porous so whatever you draw on it ain't coming out if you decide to cut something a little different, but really in the dark nobody can tell.



If you're stumped for ideas or just not artistically minded you can find pumpkin carving templates all over the internet. These are basically stencils and patterns you can use when carving.

After you've planned out your carving g'wan and cut a circle in the top of the pumpkin, around the stem, and scoop out the guts. You can use a spoon if you're squeamish but really just reach your hand on down in there and tear it out by the handful.

Have your lovely assistant pick the seeds out of the pulp while you get on with the scooping and carving. Like I mentioned earlier, carving is an opportunity for a fun social communal activity – the more people you get involved the better, and Lovely Assistants are always appreciated.





While they toil at separating the seeds, you can commence with the actual carving out of the face you'd drawn on earlier. You'll want to carve out the pumpkin's inner flesh with a spoon until the shell is about an inch thick all the way around.

Using a Pumpkin Carving Template

If you're using a template from the internet you'll want to print it out and pin or tape it to the pumpkin's face. If you don't have a nice flat surface to work with you can soak the printout in vegetable oil to make it mold easily to the surface you're working with, or just make minor tears in the paper as required. Once its affixed, you're going to create guidelines in the pumpkin's surface with the pin wherever you think will help you out. The general idea is to remove the paper and then play connect-the-dots with the carving knife.

We have no photos of this because we true artistes would NEVER resort to using a stencil when working in the medium of gourd.

Pumpkin Seeds

When you're done you'll have a lot of leftover material – pumpkin flesh, seeds, and the stringy membrane the seeds are suspended in. You can just toss the membrane, but the seeds and flesh can be eaten. There are a ton of recipes out there for using the flesh – make a pie – but what I like to do with the seeds is roast them, almost as part of the carving process.

While you're carving, your Lovely Assistants can rinse out the pumpkin guts to get any leftover membrane off of the seeds. When they're clean you want to boil them in salt water and let them simmer a good ten minutes to infuse them – 2 cups of water and a half tablespoon of salt to every half-cup of seeds. We ended up with a cup of seeds, so that's 4 cups of water and a tablespoon of salt.

After they've simmered coat a pan with a tablespoon of olive oil and spread the seeds out in a single layer in it. Roast them at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or until a nice brown. We added in chunks of pumpkin flesh as well, and they came out very tender and pumpkin-y.

The seeds, once roasted, make a great traditional snack that can be shared and enjoyed as part of the overall process. There are a lot of other uses for your pumpkin's leavings; do you have any to share with us?

Apples and Peanut Butter Drizzled with Honey

Apples are pretty great on their own. They're delicious, have a crisp crunchy texture, and are generally considered to be pretty good for you. They're easy to eat in their native form, and can be easily sliced up for convenient sharing.

Adding a few toppings — peanut butter and honey, in this case — is an easy way to promote apples from a good snack to an amazing snack.

It's summer, so we get apples from the Andersonville Farmers' Market. These were on sale as "seconds" so need to be refrigerated to keep them from going soft. But otherwise they're great, and we got a bushel of them for $3. Kat doesn't recall what variety these were, but they are not quite as tart as your standard Granny Smith apple. They were, of course, locally grown by Hillside Orchards in Michigan.

The honey is also local, stocked at Whole Foods: Some Honey buckwheat honey from Wisconsin.  It has a very rich, dark flavor. (Their cranberry honey is also a favorite.)

Preparation

Take an apple. Slice it up into as many pieces as you feel like you can handle. In the above example we cut it up into smaller slices, but if you're in the mood for it you can get away with just bisecting the apple. Smear the peanut butter liberally over the cut surface, but be aware that it won't stick easily to the wet slickness.

I'd suggest applying the peanut butter to each of the slices first, arranging them together, then drizzling the honey over the assembly — it's easier than trying to daub a bit onto each piece, and really you just need that little taste of honey.

Outcome

The apples we used in these snacks were rather tart, so their tanginess contrasted well with the sweetness of the honey and the savor of the peanut-butter. The pieces crunch pleasantly, and you just feel like you're eating right. Fruit is one of those things that our mothers were always trying to foist off on us as snacks, and taking a few minutes to dress it up with a bit of peanut butter and honey results in a decadent treat that far outstrips the effort it takes to pull it off.